As a complement to this, here’s a little “one of these is not like the others” theater for you this morning.
Again, the relative lack of results is disappointing, to say the least, but it does at least say that the program under Richt is able to find top talent, bring it in and develop it. Now they’ve just got to figure out how to coach ’em up enough to make a four-team playoff consistently.
Get The Picture 
That’s disappointing
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Senator, I know you’re trolling for the Richt haters to come out of the woodwork with this post. Am I disappointed that we don’t have another crystal football in B-M in the Richt era? Yes. Do I place that as a failure of the Georgia football program? By no means. If you want to talk about the lack of an SEC title since ’05, I am extremely disappointed we haven’t won one since and that result showed the rot in the program that started with the departure of BVG and ended with the Game That Shall Not Be Named in Memphis. Is it a firable offense? Not at this point because we’ve been in the conversation and just haven’t gotten over the hump in ’11 and ’12.
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Good post. There’s never been a point where Richt should be fired. Though, I must say, it did get razor close.
No question about it, IMHO. I might even take it a step further, and say the remaining remnants of the rot ended this past January in Jacksonville. Or maybe two weeks after that (and in some sense is still in the process of ending as we speak).
Hope I’m right about that point, because if so, we’re in for some fun days ahead. And if I may say so, Richt deserves it, and so do we.
~~~
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Three of those programs have been on probation, Ohio St., Miami and USC. I;m not sure about LSU. Just saying.
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“..Richt is able to find top talent, bring it in and develop it. Now they’ve just got to figure out how to coach ‘em up..”
But Brother Bluto, maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe CMR recruits lousy players and coaches ’em up for the nfl.
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If that’s the case, there are a lot of recruiting services and opposing programs doing a bad job evaluating the recruits UGA signs year after year.
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Ah yes, the recruiting services loved the ‘dream team’, didn’t they.
But back to your point – yes, CMR & Co should be getting better results with the talent available to them. UGA has so many advantages over other schools – flagship U, enviable recruiting base, fan support, and much, much more.
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+1.
~~~
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I can’t agree with the “fan support” portion of that, we have one of the whiniest fan bases in all of CFB. Show up for games? Yeah, pretty good at that but our fans are more destructive than constructive in their vocal criticism. All fan bases have detractors to be sure but much of the “heat” that has surrounded the program is self-grown.
Perhaps the expectations are too high by some but the scathing attacks on some of our coaches and players are by the UGA fans and then picked up by the media which feed off every single controversy, and magnify the issues. People like the FBombs of the world used this to unmercifully roast Richt long before his seat got hot. One only has to look at the past 13 years and juxtapose them against the history of the program to see that we are doing pretty danged well, especially given the constraints we face that much of our competition doesn’t.
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+1,000,000. Some of our fans are more like frenemies.
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Recruiting and developing nfl caliber talent is a prerequisite to playing for a national championship. Once you assemble the guys who are physically talented enough, you then need to form a cohesive uNit with each member mentally ready to do his job EVERY down. The latter is where UGA has failed for decades.
Stars have to align to win a national championship. A lot more stars have to align for Georgia to win a national championship. Reason is simple: the program from the top to the bottom handicaps itself which means we rarely assemble a complete championship caliber football team.
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Point well taken here. We do handicap ourselves, to a significant extent. Some of it I agree with .. the stuff we do to maintain integrity. Then again, some of it wasn’t necessary to accomplish that.
Since Pruitt’s arrival, we’ve begun to get out of doing that to ourselves, unnecessarily. Whether Richt had seen the light on certain things, or Pruitt helped him see it, or a combination of both, IDK. But we seem to be smarter, a lot smarter I’d say, in the way we’re handling things this year. We seem to be more efficient in the way we’re handling personnel now, for example. And we didn’t have to compromise one iota of principle or integrity to do that.
I’ve been saying for some years that we don’t have to compromise anything, in terms of standards, to win big, to abide at the very top of the SEC, year in and out. And it’s these kind of things I had in mind when making those statements.
All we have to do is be smart about the way we do things, and that’s enough to make up for the necessary handicaps we place on ourselves, in order to uphold our standards and integrity. And the thing that makes that possible, as someone else just said, is that at Georgia we have certain inherent advantages over other teams.
All we need do is take full advantage of them.
~~~
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So you are trolling for Richt-haters, Bluto. I’m not a Richt-hater but I am realistic when I ask: Has there been a bigger under-achieving program in all of college football than Georgia under CMR? Georgia had the best team in the country in 2007 and lost to a marginal USCe team and didn’t show up in Knoxville. Arguably Georgia had the best personnel in the nation in 2008 and you saw what happened in the Bama and FU games, not to mention the Tech game. And 2010, yegads what an abortion! Game after game kicked away by bad coaching decisions in-game! Even in 2012 when he had what I believe was his finest team from a personnel standpoint that team managed to not show up for the game against the Cocks. (And I’m not even going to go into the end of the SECCG.) There are a lot of things CMR does right: he’s a good recruiter; he’s a good Xs and Os guy; he is a good developer of talent, particularly at the QB position; he runs a clean program and is an excellent face for the program. But he makes bonehead decisions at the worst possible times during games that cause the team to lose. And he gets no respect from the SEC, from refs, from anybody. He’s John Cooper all over again. And remember what happened to Cooper.
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Oh, I didn’t mention the 2010 South Carolina-Georgia game where CMR, by incompetent special teams play, managed to lose a game that Georgia should have won by 3 TDs.
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Excuse me, 2011 South Carolina-Georgia game.
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I almost for got to mention–CMR is starting to amass a pretty bad bowl record with Georgia losing 3 out of its last 4 bowl games.
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Yet somehow he’s managed to coach in more of the last three SECCGs than any other coach in the conference, including Saban.
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Remind me, how many of those last 3 SECCGs did he win? That’s the problem right there. Under CMR Georgia has become the team that wins enough to get into a big game–then loses the big game. He’s 2-3 in SECCGs. More than that, when he has a really big game during the regular season he often finds a way to lose those, too. Not every time, but often enough to be disconcerting.
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Probably not. I don’t know of one. The record, and the film behind it, speaks for itself. But IMO, there’s good reason to believe we’re coming out of that mode, as discussed above in this thread, and in others this year to date.
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Well, UGA is a Top 15 program by almost any measurement so there are 100+ programs that underachieve that….annually. We all start with the same number of scholarships, governed by the same “general” rules and play a comparable number of games. UGA plays a much tougher group of hombres than nearly all every year, and self-imposes tougher standards on itself. We are pretty fortunate I think, much more so than most of my life of loving this program.
Since opportunity is what you do with it, and all programs have that, you could make a better case that we over achieve relative to other programs. We may under achieve some of our fans’ expectations but they are fanatics after all so it is difficult to judge how reasonable/fair those expectations are.
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Mac, 100+ teams didn’t have 70+ players drafted by the NFL in the last 13 seasons–only LSU, Ohio State USC Miami and Georgia did. Those other 4 all won BCSNCs–only Georgia hasn’t. That was the point of the Senator’s post, to ask the question: Why? So, while the Toledo Rockets may be overachieving based on what that team has to work with (you seem to think they are underachieving, but I digress) it is fairly obvious the Georgia Bulldogs under CMR are underachieving based on the fact that Georgia has had so many top players come through the program without getting a crystal football. N’est pas?
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Mac, I think the point Mayor made is good. To me, the question, or maybe definition, goes this way .. what have we achieved with the talent we had to work with? Put another way, have we played to our talent level?
And the truthful answer to that, IMO, is a resounding ‘NO’. That’s what the film of the last 8-9 years shows. I don’t think that’s because Richt isn’t a good coach, or even that Richt can’t coach beyond his talent level. I think there’s a lot of reasons for it, but Richt is the man in charge. I suspect, if he had those 8 years to do over again, he would do some things differently, and the results would have been different.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting signals that Richt is moving beyond his ‘training’ under Bowden, having realized some of its shortcomings, and for several years now, has been figuring out things on his own. I suspect he is now beginning to come into his own as a head coach.
We’ll see, because if I’m right our overall mentality during the season will improve, and we’ll become consistent once again. I still don’t know if he’s got a handle of the psychology part of it, as far as leading his team through a whole season. We’ll see about that, too. But I do sense a change in him, and for the better.
I think he should have fired Grantham after the Bowl Game, but things couldn’t have worked out better. He’s always had, not dominating talent, but sufficient talent. Even that can, and should be improved, and I think he now has us on that track.
But after 9 long years, in terms of staff, he finally has his dominoes in place. We’ll see what he can do with them.
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Misaligned indicator to me. Primarily, in my viewpoint, there is a difference in having the talent on board and having it available. This ignores the huge disadvantage UGA plays under with the inequality of disciplinary actions. Also, who is injured, and for what games (admittedly, that is true for all teams). And at what point does that talent reach their productive point? Not all players are NFL caliber until late in their careers. Measuring individual talent in a team game is very tricky; who were they surrounded with? You can have an all pro guard or center but be weak at tackle and get poor production from your OL. Lastly, the crystal footballs are not as reliable an indicator of coaching as it is other factors, see Chizik, Coker, Brown, etc.
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Right. Of course it’s more than just Jimmies and Joes. While you have to have them to be successful, there’s a LOT more to it than that.
~~~
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Whether it be BVG, Martinez, Grantham or Pruitt me thinks Richt needs to be a little more hands on with the defense. I don’t mean run it, but let those guys know how important that side of the ball is from a big picture standpoint. It is not just there to groom for the NFL but to win the big game for UGA.
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I think the last few years Coach Richt has been having his heart ripped out by his own defense and special teams. He is an Offense coach and he has up until this point let the DC run the D with almost no interference. This works fine as long as the DC is worth a damn. He let Wllie and the boys take us down a bad path. He then could not get the Quality DC he wanted and settled, yes settled for Grantham. You can spin TG’s hire but you can’t change the fact that Richt tried for the Chief and for Foster before he settled. Now he has apparently hit a home run with CJP, that remains to be seen.
He has changed to some extent his hard headed ST’s philosophy to one that might just keep us from the self inflicted wounds of the past few years. If Mason can just hand the ball to TG and the gang of running backs we have ala Buck to Herschel, and not turn the ball over we will be fine on offense. If the D is back to an average D and doesn’t treat 3rd and long as a form of Chinese water torture/fire drill it will be fine. Finally if the ST’s can just catch the damn punts, return a few kicks and not have punts blocked or dropped, we will be fine.
All the above being said I still think that we will lose to SC and God help me UF and one other team. Why??? because we are GEORGIA and that is how we roll and have been rolling since we have been playing football with the exception of 1942 and 1980..
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Modern day Tom Osborne?
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I could live with that comparison.
It took Osborne nearly 20 years to win a MNC and then he won 2 in 4 years and might should have won a third.
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