If Bobo haz a crayon, what’s everybody else holding?

Not trying to be overly snarky here, but is there any other coach on the staff that would say something like this about the defense or special teams?

“There was definitely a lull there, the Missouri and Vanderbilt games, but you’ve got to give those guys credit,” Bobo said. “There was an adjustment period there that we had to go through. The Missouri game we pretty much stayed aggressive but we kind of turned the ball over a little bit, some timing issues. We tried to slow it down a little bit in the Vanderbilt game and didn’t have the results that way either and had to go back to the drawing board and the guys responded and answered and came back and played well the rest of the year.”

I was critical of Bobo a few years back after the loss at Auburn in 2010 for not game planning/play calling in the context of what Georgia needed to do to win:

… Bobo’s responsibility isn’t simply to make sure his offense scores a bunch of points.  It’s to make sure that it scores more points than the other team does.  And there lies the rub about his success as a coordinator.  Context is a bitch when your team goes 6-6.

Context in this case is supplied in this Ben Dukes post about Georgia’s defense.  Blame it on a coordinator whose NFL experience left him ill-prepared for the college spread attack, or blame it on personnel shortcomings which arose as a natural result of a scheme change, but the fact is that Georgia’s defense had a hard time all season with offenses that ran the ball out of spread/option schemes.  If you’re Bobo, maybe you can tell yourself mid-year that your defense will get better as it climbs the learning curve, but by the time the last two games of the year rolled around, it should have been obvious that wasn’t going to happen.  Georgia’s defense needed every bit of help it could get from their offensive mates.

Gee, that last sentence has an echo, doesn’t it?  The thing is, I believe the lesson’s being learned.  Bobo not only had a similar challenge this season, but he had to face it with one hand tied behind his back at times.  (Think about Murray’s surrounding cast in the Missouri and Vanderbilt games and realize the amount of adjusting and scrubbing the playbook that Bobo had to attempt to fashion something that his quarterback could trust and run with all the green players surrounding him.)  As he acknowledges, there was a lull, but the offense did catch a needed second wind after that.

It wasn’t always pretty – injuries and an inconsistent offensive line made sure of that – but I do have the sense that Bobo is calling plays based on his surroundings much more than he used to.  Sure, you’d like to think that the defense and special teams can hold up their end of the bargain, but you can’t count on it.  Bobo’s coming around on that.  And that’s making for a more effective offense.