Remarkably similar sentiments expressed by two coaches at winless major programs –
Brian Kelly: “I like our players. I like where we’re going. I know you’ve got to win; I get that,” he said. “We should have obviously taken care of the football better, made a couple plays here or there, coached a little bit better. We’re all disappointed. It’s not acceptable to lose, especially at Notre Dame.”
“That hasn’t changed one bit,” Richt said. “Let’s face it, could that game Saturday have gone either way? I think it’s pretty obvious that it could have. Did we improve tremendously in a lot of areas? There’s no doubt about that.
“I left the field sick about losing but encouraged about the team — encouraged about so many things that are important to winning.”
There are only so many ways for a coach to spin the hope that his team will get buttah.
Get The Picture 
Even with the best possible outcome the rest of the year we will look back on the early season and wonder what might have been had we had our stuff together for these first two games. Will be interesting to see if we show up prepared (like we did against usc, in spite of the obvious mistakes) the rest of the way. Or if we have the occassional (or regular) sleep walking performances like we have seen way too many times the last few years
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I think that, and not a specific win-loss record, or “beat Florida, didn’t lose to Tech” is the metric CMR’s job status should be judged by this season.
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Couldn’t agree more
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Right on for me, too. Not looking at next year already but, we are a fairly young team. I can take another loss (maybe two), if they are all-out battles and we make fewer mistakes than the SC game.
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buttah and buttah
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wir fightin’. wir fightin real hard.
jes gonna hafta get buttah an buttah.
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Every time I think they get buttah, I get margarine.
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+1
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You can’t worry about what it sounds like, you can’t rationalize it…. you can only say what you say, and then prove yourself by actually getting better. That is all.
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Hope is all we got, but, unfortunately, I fear it won’t be enough to avoid something like a 7-5, 6-6 or even 5-7 season. It’s great to see all the positive vibes after the “moral victory” vs SC, but we’ve got to be realistic here. Regardless of how it happened, we have a team with a bunch of brand new starters, a non-clutch quarterback trying to do too much, a thin O-Line and a “snake bite” problem that didn’t go away after all, as many of us had thought during the controversy-free off season (e.g, the very 2 players Coach says he can’t afford to lose are temporarily lost). You can pencil in MSU, UF and AU losses, and UT has all the time in the world to prepare for UGA and lotsa confidence vs. us in Neyland. We’ll be competing with Ole Miss and GT on essentially level playing fields, could easily lose 1 or both. Intensely wish it were otherwise, of course–don’t want to have to wait for next year for us to get “exponentially” “buttah”–just think that it’ll take longer than impatient fans think it should.
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Uga is not any way as bad off as ND. Those two teams we played vs who ( or the state of their current program who!) are in two different worlds.
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Agreed. ND is irrelevant.
We however are tightrope walking over the chasm of irrelevancy.
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0-2 is still 0-2. As for that chasm of irrelevancy, the Dawgs find themselvs smack dab in the middle of irrelevancy. We are now in year 4 of irrelevancy (2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011). If there were levels of irrelevancy, the Dawgs would not be as deeply planted as ND. Sadly, UGA is not a player in big time college football right now.
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Damn dude, UGA went 10-2 in 2008 if I remember right, how is that irrelevant?
Yes, ranked 1 pre-season. Tons of injuries and a really bad first half against Alabama. Really bad game against FU too.
Other than that it was a good season.
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We lost. At home. To Tech.
2008 was not a good season.
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3 losses. And Bama and Florida absolutely destroyed us. Then Tech beat us at home by hanging 45 points on us. I agree, maybe not irrelevant, but hugely disappointing.
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Bama didn’t “destroy” us. Bama built up a big lead (31-0 at the half) and held on for an 11 point victory as UGA scored 30 points on ;em in the second half.
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Many of those points were garbage time against their second string. From the middle of the second quarter, the Bama game was never in doubt.
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You make a great point Skeptic Dawg.
I think you could actually carry it further back in time though. Basically, we have not been relevant since we won the championship in ’80.
Hawai’i… what a gimmie. WVa… whopped our asses.
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1. 2008 we won 10 games. Tech is going to beat us occasionally. Shoot, if they didn’t beat us every now and then, it would take all the fun out of it. But we won 10 games. You can’t start with a season where we won ten games. Seriously. Who’s to say CMR didn’t “coach up” Stafford and Moreno to NFL caliber talent, and without CMR we would have only won 8 games that year?
2. 2009 we went 8-5. True, we only won one game against a ranked opponent, but although 8-5 is not a fantastic season, it’s not really “terrible” either, is it?
3. 2010 was a terrible season.
4. You can’t count 2011, we’re only two games in!
So what I see here really is one mediocre year (2009) and one bad year (2010). It may be that 2010 just lasts a couple of games longer than we want. I think we are holding CMR up to standards that he set for us, not standards that were here before he got here.
This is not to say he’s not driving me crazy with some stuff. Field goals…I don’t understand them in games you know are going to be shootouts. I think I’d tell my team, “look, if we’re inside our opponent’s 35 yard line, and it’s 4th and 3 or less, don’t look over here. We’re going for it, okay? Every damn time. So you’d better stay out of 4th downs you can’t get yourself out of.”
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Well, obviously coachspeak is coachspeak, but both men are telling the truth. Notre Dame should feel a lot worse than Georgia right now, but even the Irish played an immensely better game Saturday than they did when they lost to South Florida. Georgia looked great Saturday, they just kept tripping over themselves.
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Blah, Blah, Blah. I can’t hear them because their actions are to loud.
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I’m frankly sickened that our Kool-aid drinkers are back out in full force after a “moral victory” and in support of this staff, nevermind this three year, two game tailspin we are in. When did UGA start being satisfied with moral victories? Is that what we’ve come to now guys? Let’s face it, we have been playing uninspired, undisciplined football since 2008, thinking we can win just because we had a couple of good years. This is the coaching staff’s fault that this sense of complacency has taken over. I’v had all this garbage from CMR that I can handle.
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I guess some people are willing to let the entire season play out before they hop off of the bus. Some others had their mind made up before the season even started.
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Make that 2 seasons ago. I know that I am in the minority, but I believe we have seen the best from CMR. The first game of the season only further proved my belief. How do you prepare for one game all offseason and look as uninspired as this team looked. Yes, they did look much better against USC. Great! They still sit at 0-2. I have seen enough from CMR to believe he is not capable of righting the ship. On year it is a lack of offense. The next year it is zero defense. Throw in a poor O-line, or weak secondary. CMR is just not capable of correcting the mess he has created. If I am wrong, I will be the first to say so. However, as we sit winless entering week #3, I do not thing that is the case.
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You’re not in the minority. And they played inspired against Florida and Auburn last year with similar results only to revert back to whatever you want to call the bowl game effort level.
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One thing is certain: nothing will change until the end of this season at the earliest, possibly not until the end of next season. For that reason many people are content to let it play out. Each to their own.
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Notre Dame is much worse off than UGA. I’m 37 and kids today look at Notre Dame the same way people my age look at Army football. They have all this history and greatness in their past but they just have never mattered in their lifetime. I guess Notre Dame still acts like they are important but a whole generation have never seen them count for anything. They best thing they could do is jump in the Big 10/11/whatever they are now when they eventually increase to 16 teams.
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It’s funny, I was thinking about Kelly the other day. If UGA and Richt part ways, obviously we have to find a new coach. I was thinking how Kelly was one of the hot, up-&-coming names in college football a couple of years ago, but ND is still struggling in year 2.
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“Richt said. “Let’s face it, could that game Saturday have gone either way? I think it’s pretty obvious that it could have.”
Gone either way? I don’t want it to be taken as kicking somebody while he’s down, but I thought we could’ve won by at least 3 TDs. If not for our screw-ups the game was a total miss-match.
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I have always said that Richt’s religion gets in the way. He is fatalistic in how he views events to unfold. He seems to believe that the players tried hard and the coaches coached hard but they did not win because fate or deity, in his case, did not grant it so. If check comments on here and DawgSports.
This mindset is damaging because it breeds everything we cannot have in football; lack of effort to improve. It is a mindset that simply says that whatever happens, happens and you just have to keep moving forward and trying hard. But the problem is that there is no end. The players keep playing with no anticipation of victory. There is no definitive belief that they can stop the next play. They seem to believe that what happens is fate or deity’s will; they just have to play hard.
This is why there is not GATA. This is why there is no momentum to improve immediately. It is a wait till fate moves kinda attitude.
I know there are religious themes other than fate in the work with CMR but it is easier to comprehend the mental state if you use the term fate or fatalism. My theological leanings want to express other anti-fatalistic stuff but C’est la vie.
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