I could live a little better with the myths and the lies
When the darkness broke in, I just broke down and cried
— Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control” (1978)
As I get older, it’s no longer partying as much as it is tailgating your own funeral.
— Kyle Kinane
Well, as much time as I’ve spent railing against it, it looks like the “Mark Richt Has Lost Control” meme might just sink this program after all. Only it’s not the players he’s lost control of, it’s the coaching staff.
Depending on whose side you take, the growing chaos in the Georgia football program is a result of either a) a brash outsider going out of his way to inflame tempers and make enemies or b) a moribund program stubbornly resisting the efforts of an energetic outsider to shake off old, ineffective ways and get the team over the hump. I’ll admit I fall a little closer to the “b” side, believing as I do that there was a lot that needed to be shaken up in the Georgia program and we do need to try some new things. Yes, Jeremy Pruitt may be a meathead and a loudmouth; however, if you’re going to disown the efforts of every loudmouthed meathead who’s ever held Georgia’s defensive coordinator, that means you get to flush Todd Grantham down the memory hole, but you’ll have to send Brian VanGorder with him.
But I’m not going to spend a lot of time picking sides as if this were some binary, either-or, Democrat-Republican sort of deal, because I just don’t have the energy. Right now, what I want more than anything is for Georgia to just broom the entire coaching staff and start with a clean slate.
If that sounds too drastic for you, ask yourself: What path can you draw out of this that leads to a better outcome? Here are the possibilities as I see them:
Richt keeps both Schottenheimer and Pruitt. Not going to happen. Every opinion I’ve read, even from those who are the most sanguine about Georgia’s prospects going forward, points to Pruitt being gone after this season.
Richt dumps Schottenheimer, keeps Pruitt. Same deal, though getting rid of Schottenheimer would be a definite plus. Unfortunately, the rift between Pruitt and Schottenheimer isn’t even the most significant in the program right now; by all accounts, Pruitt is on the outs with Richt and Greg McGarity, which is the primary reason he’ll be out of Athens before the year is out.
Richt dumps Pruitt, keeps Schottenheimer. This way lies madness. Pruitt may be a personality problem, and his Georgia tenure certainly hasn’t been perfect, but there is no conceivable metric by which one could portray his body of work as inferior to Schottenheimer’s. Firing the one guy who’s been aggressive about combating the good-enough-is-good-enough mentality in the Georgia football program lately, while keeping the architect of what is shaping up to be the Bulldogs’ most inept offense in decades, would bring a restless fan base to the point of open revolt.
Richt dumps both of them. The old “embattled coach cleans house” maneuver is like icing the kicker — something that keeps getting tried over and over again in spite of the fact that it hardly ever works. Can you name a coach who’s managed to fire both coordinators and stave off his firing by anything more than a year or two? Some coordinators may be dumb — I can name one right off the top of my head — but the good ones won’t be, and they’ll recognize an avoid-at-all-costs sinking ship when they see one.
And as attractive as the last option might be, it still saddles us with the person bearing primary responsibility for having allowed this season to devolve into its current dumpster-fire state — Mark Richt himself.
Even now, it pains me to even type those words, but it’s true. Why would you bring in someone whose most recent career stops were at Alabama and Florida State — winning national-title rings at both — in an effort to put a spark in an underachieving program, only to chafe at his personality later, as if you’d had no idea what you were getting? How on earth could someone with Richt’s reputation for QB development allow such a smoldering crater to develop at that position? And what on earth did he see in Brian Schottenheimer that made him think we should not only entrust our offense to the guy, but pay him $850,000 a year for the privilege?
I’m not gonna try and rewrite history here — when the Schottenheimer hire was first announced, I told people, “Doesn’t matter, all he has to do is call handoffs to Nick Chubb and we’ll be fine.” Deep down, though, I wondered why we would throw all that money to someone whose coaching résumé included all of two years at the college level, and who hadn’t done anything noteworthy in the pros, either, even by the notoriously conservative standards of NFL offenses. And who knows, maybe if Nick Chubb were still around (damn you to hell, Neyland turf), there’d still be some bloom on Schottenheimer’s rose — but even then, I doubt it. Remember, outside of Chubb’s 83-yard TD run against Alabama — our first legit opponent of the season, it turns out — he only managed 63 yards on 19 carries in that game (a 3.3 average), and what I’ve seen from our offensive line since then tells me that wouldn’t have been the last time our ground game got bottled up. And we still wouldn’t have a quarterback with the bare minimum of skills necessary to keep opposing defenses from cramming eight or nine guys in the box.
And now we are where we are. There are four games left in the regular season, and if you wrote the numbers 4, 3, 2, 1 and 0 on little scraps of paper and put them in a hat and told me to pick one out, I could make a case for us winning that many games no matter which number I picked. Could we have an undefeated November? Against a slate that’s a combined 17-16, sure. But we could also get punked by a Georgia Southern team that’s handled the transition to FBS ball better than anyone could’ve predicted. Hell, even as awful as Georgia Tech is, we could be so beaten down by failure and recrimination by the end of the season that we cough one up on the Flats. Nothing would surprise me at this point. When you don’t care enough to expect anything, that’ll happen.
Maybe that’s why, as rough as the past month has been, I’ve managed not to lose any sleep over a single game. But I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the one night I did: Nov. 2, 2002, the night after the Georgia-Florida game.
Part of it was that I’d gotten rill drunk watching the game at the Mellow Mushroom down the street from me in Birmingham, and while booze may help ease the pain of such a crushing loss, it still isn’t conducive to a good night’s sleep. But as I tossed and turned in bed, the Georgia-Florida game was all I had to think about. How could we have played so badly against a team that barely escaped Auburn and Kentucky and lost to Ole Miss? How did we let our dream season get taken to the brink by Ron Zook? After all those years of failure against Florida, how could we have taken such a perfect situation — undefeated, gunning for a national title, facing a Florida program as vulnerable as it’d been since before Spurrier came home — and squandered it like that?
From there, of course, we had the “Prayer on the Plains,” the 51-7 napalming of Georgia Tech, the drought-breaking SEC title win and the victory lap in the Sugar Bowl. Even stinging disappointment tends to get drowned out by commotion like that. Amidst that kind of euphoria, the Florida loss was simply a blip on the radar, an unfortunate stumble that still couldn’t derail Georgia on what appeared to be a road back to greatness. An outlier that couldn’t deny the larger trend.
Well, now we know: That loss was not a bug but a feature. On an annual basis, there would be a breakdown like that. Sometimes it would be a close loss to a mediocre team, like the ’02 Florida game had been. Sometimes it would be a blowout loss to an elite team, though one with which we still should’ve been competitive. (Sometimes, as with last year’s Florida game, the opponent would be mediocre and the margin would be huge.) But every year, at least once, there would be a loss that made us all wonder just what the hell the team was doing out there, what the coaches had been doing all week. That had us asking, How in the world could we have played like that? The question wasn’t would an inexplicable beatdown happen, it was when, and which team would do the honors.
And it would happen no matter how good that year’s Georgia team was, or how good we thought it was. The 2004 team, losing at home to Tennessee the week after dealing a 29-point beatdown to LSU, the defending national champions. The 2007 squad, which won the Sugar Bowl but was down 28-0, at halftime, to Tennessee. The 2012 team that was five yards away from a national-title shot but 28 points away from beating South Carolina. Even when everything set up perfect, when the roster was stocked and the conference was wide-open, it would happen.
That was when everything was perfect. When it wasn’t perfect, well … when the star receiver was suspended for selling his jersey or the quarterback didn’t live up to his billing or none of the quarterbacks lived up to their billing, it would happen repeatedly and sink the entire season. On both a micro in-game level and a macro level, our program responds to fantastic situations and terrible ones with equal ineptitude. Either way, the response from the fan base is the same: a shrug, a sigh and Well, maybe next year will set up better, and it always does, until it doesn’t.
When I was little, like three or four years old, I had this recurring dream that I was riding in the car with my mom and little sister. We were in our Chevy Malibu station wagon with blue vinyl seats, mom in the driver’s seat, Ann and I in our car seats in back, heading toward I-81 on Tyler Road right outside of Radford, Va. — that’s how vivid this dream still is. We’d be driving down the road, and I’d look down at a book or a toy or something, or over at my sister, and when I looked back up the driver’s seat would be empty. And as the car continued motoring down the road, I’d look out the side window and see my mom, walking back the way we’d come on the other side of the highway, and she’d be waving at us like everything was fine.
That’s what it would feel like every time Georgia had one of those out-of-nowhere, inexplicable, failure-in-every-last-phase-of-the-game losses: Who’s driving this car? Why are they strolling around over there like everything’s fine?
The saving grace of that dream was that it didn’t damage my relationship with my mom. (Seriously, I don’t know why I kept having it. My relationship with her was fine then and it’s great now.) And the saving grace of those disastrous Georgia losses was that we managed to not go in the tank for an entire season afterward; for the most part, they were fairly isolated.
Now, though, it doesn’t feel like the coaches have lost control of an individual, isolated game. It feels like there’s no one at the wheel of the program. Obviously, I haven’t always agreed with Richt’s decisions or his logic, sometimes even when we’ve been winning, but at least I could usually feel assured that he was operating in a logical, steady fashion. It doesn’t feel that way now, though. The inexplicable Schottenheimer hire; the worsening staff discord; the Wheel O’ Quarterbacks that has left us wondering from week to week which QB will be starting, which one will be benched, and which one will be punting — they all speak to a head guy who’s no longer operating out of logic but out of desperation, throwing stuff at the wall in the hopes that something’ll stick. Under any coach, that would be frustrating. Under Mark Richt, who up until now has been more likely to take flak for being too boring and set in his ways, it’s downright terrifying.
I don’t think that’s being overdramatic, because the chaos festering in the program right now has the potential to reverberate long after this season’s over. Suppose both Schottenheimer and Pruitt are shown the door after this season. Not only will you have potential replacements wondering if Georgia is a morass they want to take a chance on, you’ll have recruits wondering the same thing. And if the Bulldogs’ rivals smell blood in the water, that’s how dispiriting losses turn into lengthy streaks that handcuff a program as severely as any NCAA penalty. When Phil Fulmer was ousted in Knoxville, we all gloated that Mark Richt was the driving force in making it happen. Now we’re wondering if Jim McElwain or Butch Jones might be doing it to Richt. (Or if Nick Saban already has.)
Unloading a couple coordinators isn’t going to stop that from happening if everyone knows we’re just marking time until the ax falls on the coach’s head. Between the losses on the field and the resentment in the front office, there’s just too much poison in this well. I never thought I’d have to say this — and I certainly hoped I wouldn’t — but at this point only a complete housecleaning is going to take care of it. And that includes Mark Richt.
And yet, I still can’t bring myself to utter the words Fire Mark Richt. That just doesn’t seem natural for a guy who’s won more games than any Georgia coach other than Vince Dooley and a higher winning percentage than any of them since the 1920s. It may have been a long time ago, but that 2002 season still means something; it meant that after the embarrassment of the Goff years and the frustration of the Donnan ones, Georgia was still a program people had to care about. As bad as things are right now, they don’t erase our debt to Richt for making all that happen.
My ideal scenario for the last month of the 2015 regular season — and yes, all this may sound horribly Pollyannaish and naive, just bear with me — is for Georgia to beat Kentucky, Auburn, Georgia Southern and Georgia Tech, earn a bid to the Music City Bowl or something, and then, after accepting that bid, Richt announces he’s retiring. The team sends him out with one last win (his 146th), we hire Justin Fuente from Memphis, and life goes on. Because I have no desire to punish Mark Richt or embarrass him. It’s become a cliché to call him “a good man,” but some clichés become clichés because they’re true. There is no reason for any Georgia fan to want him to go out anything less than a winner.
And I’m damn sure not going to root for the team to lose just because it might hasten his departure. Even if you think the coaches don’t deserve any better than that, the players do. The coaches will be fine whatever happens; if Richt got fired tomorrow, his most pressing dilemma would be whether to deposit his $800,000 buyout directly into an IRA or cash it out into hundreds and roll around in it on his bed. But the players are just playing the hand they’ve been dealt. Continued losses aren’t going to do them any good. Wins — and the confidence that the fan base is still behind them — will.
But even with all that said, we’re in a tailspin now, and I don’t think Richt has what it takes to pull us out of it. Yes, we bounced back from a bad stretch in 2006, from a couple miserable seasons in 2009 and ’10 — but the problem is that even after 2006, there was a 2009 and ’10, and even after we thought we’d bounced back from those years, there’s now a ’15. I’m not one of those blinkered fans who thinks that Georgia is entitled to win every single game they play 77-0, but I don’t want to be stuck in this cycle anymore. And if it’s on its third revolution, yes, it’s a cycle — one entrenched enough that, even if we bang out four or five more wins this season, I’ll still be waiting for it to come back around again a few years from now. Maybe sooner.
I want good things to happen to Mark Richt, but my greater priority is for good things to happen to Georgia. And I think we’re at the point where a fresh start is a prerequisite for the latter. Someone’s got to take the wheel of this driverless car, and it’s got to be someone with the freedom to plot a new course and the energy to stay awake behind the wheel. I just hope that we’re not so constricted by fear of the unknown — or numbers, or loyalty to one man over an institution, or “The Georgia Way,” whatever that means these days — to find him.
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