Once again, the hedges took a post-game hit.
I’ve rehashed most of the big issues already, so let me keep the bullet points short and sour.
- Bobo had a tough day, mainly because his offensive line regressed significantly in the second half. But his play calling on the last drive in regulation was as good as you could ask. Except for leaving eighteen seconds on the clock.
- He wasn’t the only coordinator who had it rough. Tech came out in the second half and made a couple of adjustments in how it ran the ball. Any hope that Georgia’s defensive line was going to step up and control the B-backs vanished quickly. That forced Pruitt to try to plug the middle, which had the unfortunate consequence of leaving the defense vulnerable on the edges.
- Give Swann credit for paying attention to no whistle being blown on his 99-yard takeaway. I don’t know what the officials were thinking there, but seeing as Georgia’s been burned on occasion by the refs letting forward progress go on for an eternity, I don’t feel a bit guilty about it.
- There are a lot of things you can point at as to why Georgia lost. One that isn’t getting much attention is the Georgia series that came after Swann’s score. First, the defense held Tech for one of the few times in the second half, forcing a bad punt that gave the offense starting position on the Jackets’ 36. From there, nothing. Except a blocked field goal.
- The game was weird because special teams were weird.
- Malcolm Mitchell played his ass off again.
- Neither team missed a fourth down conversion, right?
- After the ballsy pooch kick to get the ball back with the lead, the genius proceeded to give his advantage away with some questionable play calling. Why Tech didn’t keep feeding the B-back there is something I didn’t understand.
- I don’t think Pruitt’s strategy after the squib kick was bad. I do think Leonard Floyd blew his spy responsibility by lining up wrong and letting Thomas escape for those 21 yards.
Eh, I hate a loss to Georgia Tech more than any other. But if there’s a year to toss one away, I suppose this was the one. Somehow, that’s of little comfort.
Get The Picture 
I’m with you Senator. I’m an “old” Bulldawg & I hate to ever lose toTech, especially in the way we did.
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If we got to pick a seaons to lose, I would have rather lost to Tech last year.
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If I had to pick a season to lose to Tech, I would have picked 1893.
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+1
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Seems like we could have done something to make Tech pass without giving up the edges. But what do I know?
Also, we rarely ran the play action where we faked the dive, SOLD IT, and then tried the pass. We ran it once and it worked (or we got held, can’t remember). But the way Tech was jumping on our runs, if we had run that more, I think we would’ve gotten them off the line a bit. As it was, we ran the option pass, which I don’t think is as effective.
It’s times like this that I’m glad I don’t live in Georgia. I don’t have to hear the crowing.
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“Leonard Floyd blew his spy responsibility by lining up wrong and letting Thomas escape for those 21 yards.”
That is very correct. Floyd looked like he wanted to run to the wide side of the field, almost like he forgot he was the spy and wanted to cover-but I don’t think there was an eligible receiver anywhere over there. That hurt. Because if Thomas had escaped for only 19 yards you might not have gotten 400 comments in your Sunday post.
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But Floyd is never likely in that position if the Dawgs slam the kickoff DEEP. Thomas can’t even consider scrambling to pick up enough yards for the FG try if GT starts at the 30/35 yardline. It’s not on Floyd IMO.
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Not saying your argument doesn’t have truth in it, we all agree we should have kicked it deep, but that does not excuse giving the 20 yards up. It is always conceivable a deep kick a deep kick could have been returned to the 43, happens all the time in football. The timeout could have been used at that point, not before the FG, to make sure we have that middle distance covered to prevent them from getting to FG range.
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That’s why you kick the *^&%$ ball out of the end zone and make them line up on the 25 ! Its not like Morgan doesn’t have the leg to do it – he does it fairly frequently.
I turned to by muddy after we scored and said ?now lets not do something stupid… kick the ball out of the end zone and be done with it. But NOOOOOO we had to let them start on what – the 43 ?
We lost a game we shouldn’t have lost, but had no business winning.
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I can’t argue with that either. I wish the coaches hadn’t put the team in that position either, but Floyd was the spy. And, unfrotunately, not a very good one.
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Question is, why was Floyd the spy? Wouldn’t we need a more mobile guy to spy a mobile QB?
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Who is more mobile than Floyd on the defense?
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Swann, for example. And, no, Floyd doesn’t look very mobile when he doesn’t seal the edge.
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But you’re right about one thing — our linebackers are not exactly mobile. They’re more like lite defensive ends.
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The problem is Floyd is often too mobile and loves to free-wheel as a pass rusher and a chaser on runs.
Gap responsibility has been an issue for him this season. It was a good defensive scheme but the wrong personnel in that situation.
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I’m mostly flailing around for justification of the loss. I honestly cannot recall a football game with as many strange and abrupt swings of emotion. Maybe the 2012 SECC is close.
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Senator, your comment on the series after the fumble return was right on. That was the series where we had a chance to get control of the game, and we didn’t do it. The one series where Bobo had a brain cramp and then a blocking breakdown on Morgan’s field goal attempt.
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I blame CMR on that. Morgan has not been clutch this season and at that range I think CMR says to Bobo “this is four down territory until we are inside the 25”.
Couple that with the stupid squib kick and the Qurious Qase of Quayvon HIcks and you have a head coach that made critical strategic errors that put is in a position to lose (though I blame the loss on poor execution by the players)
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NM, I’m not sure I agree with you on the 4-down territory. It was 4th and 6 at the 32 – difficult conversion. We threw an incomplete pass that would have been called back on 3rd down. I won’t watch the replay, so I don’t know if the kick was low or the block was caused by poor blocking. I think the decision to go for 3 was the right call in the situation to get up by 2 scores, but I can appreciate your position on it.
The bottom line was that it was a wasted series for the offense and only gave the defense 1 minute of TOP to get rested after being on the field the entire 1st half of the 3rd quarter.
Here’s the drive chart:
G 1-10 T36 GEORGIA drive start at 07:32.
G 1-10 T36 Nick Chubb rush right for 3 yards to the GT33 (Marcordes, T.;Gotsis, A.).
G 2-7 T33 Nick Chubb rush up middle for 1 yard to the GT32 (Hankins, B.).
G 3-6 T32 Hutson Mason middle pass incomplete to Michael Bennett, PENALTY UGA illegal formation declined.
G 4-6 T32 Marshall Morgan field goal attempt from 49 BLOCKED, recovered by UGA Marshall Morgan at GT37 spot at GT37, clock 06:05 (blocked by Gotsis, A.).
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My thinking is that if it’s 4 down territory, Bobo runs it on 3rd down and maybe 4th as well. One of the hallmarks of CMR football (that is my personal bugaboo) is not playing keep away when the defense needs a rest.
Lou Holtz understood the limits of his talent at USC so he was careful about running the ball and not snapping it until the play clock was under 5 seconds. I’ve never seen CMR do that when (at times) I think a particular game or situation calls for it.
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NM, I guess your thought was that Richt should have treated it as 4-down territory from the beginning of the possession and told Bobo to call plays as if we’re taking 4 shots to get the 1st down. In that case, I would agree with you, but people would have been howling if we take 4 shots and don’t get the 1st down or get the FG shot. I don’t think Richt was thinking FG on 1st down. We got behind the chains on 2nd down and that completely changed the series.
It’s a judgment call. In this case, I see both sides, and neither is a clear-cut, better choice.
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I have no problem with that play sequence in that situation. Given the success we had in the first half running the ball, I would still stay heavy on what we do best.
However, after the third quarter, it was clear Tech had figured out how to defend Georgia’s zone read run game.
My issue was we stayed with a very similar play sequence in overtime after we had success with the passing game in the 4th quarter.
We went back to being predictable/conservative in OT instead of stunning their vulnerable pass defense with the long one, like we did against Alabama in 2007. Tech doesn’t practice against it so it would be a risk worth taking, especally when Tech was still thinking about that missed the extra point.
Killer instinct. Bobo had it as a player. Hope he finds it again.
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It was frustrating to watch..The perfect storm of irony..the way Georgia flew down the field, with a huffing and puffing defense on the bench trying to catch it’s breath only to fumble very deep and put them right back out there against one of the most demanding and frustrating offenses to face.
Twice.
Then the long GT drives that only became more and more difficult to stop because of the fatigue.
When all was lost, we got a gift from the genius. We went from chicken shit, back to chicken salad and then to cs in the course of a couple of minutes.
Meanwhile, the nerds did the opposite
I’ve said before that I’ll never be a “fire coach Richt” gangbanger…but I do wonder that he continues to waste victories with his overly cautious and passive style anytime the Dawgs have a lead. Yes, he’ll learn from it, but good grief, he’s been coaching a long, long time…The learning curve should be starting to straighten out. This one was bad and is particularly hard to stomach.
But it’s water under the bridge. Georgia had some great wins and some awful losses. I’m beginning to think that’s the way college football is becoming…a schitzoid world where any of the top twenty teams can humiliate themselves or their opponents on any day. I’m not certain you can say one team is number one. Champs, maybe..by a playoff system that is fair, but “best”?…may be a thing that time has passed by.
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“Georgia had some great wins and some awful losses. I’m beginning to think that’s the way college football is becoming…a schitzoid world where any of the top twenty teams can humiliate themselves or their opponents on any day.”
This pretty much describes where I’m at with Georgia football and college football in general. It’s a wild ride. Might as well enjoy it.
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+1
I’ve learned (after many hard years) to enjoy the high’s and not let the low’s get me down.
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Interesting, it has happened to every ranked team (except FSU who has been flat-lined every single game) this year. There have been games of wild euphoria and joy but every one has have a couple of crash and burn, WTF losses——-Oregon, Arizona, Michigan State, Ohio State, TCU, Baylor, Miss State, Ole Miss, Georgia, Mizzou, Wisconsin, etc. Perhaps this is the new “parity” in CFB and dominant teams are a way of the past. There have been some surprising results every weekend, the frequency of which has been more than any I can ever recall.
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To be honest, I wouldn’t be shocked if Tech beat FSU. That would be rather delicious in light of the general skullduggery that is going on in Tallahassee.
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yeah, but still hard to root for Tech. The ACCCG is one game where it’s hard to root for anybody.
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I won’t be rooting for Tech against FSU any more than I did against Kiffin and USC a couple years ago, but I will laugh like hell if Tech actually does upset them, just like I laughed at Kiffin.
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Tell you what Ntown, if that tackle whips their lineman’s ass the the way he whipped our o-line asses they have a good shot to win. Pyke has been the all american lineman I’ve been waiting for, dude has manhandled guys all year. The tackle for Tech tore his ass up and not just a little bit either. He gave him the kind of ass whipping where you are just glad the guy didn’t kill your ass while y’all were fighting. If it sounds like I’m stuck on this I am damn the pooch kick, damn the squib kick, damn the loss, damn everything just don’t let Tech physically whip YOUR ASS.
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You are dead on, that disrupted our offense all day and prevented us from getting a couple of scores plus allowing our defense to rest.
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But is he learning? Every single person in the room where I was watching was screaming ‘please don’t short kick this’ before the kickoff. All of us knew that Richt’s instinct in that situation is to play not to lose. Which always results in a loss. After the incredibly ballsy fake field goal earlier it was maddening to see us regress so quickly and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Again. How many times have we seen this over the course of fourteen years? Seems like a lot.
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It is a lot. Way too many.
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One more thing…kick it deep. Drill a line drive. No more pooch kick.
I anything good can come from that, maybe it finally killed that thought in Mark Richt’s head forever.
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No, kick it high, don’t drill it. I think getting a few seconds off the clock has always been a part of the squibb kick thinking so a high kick around the five is effective in doing that and getting coverage downfield to pin them deep. But I have nothing against always banging into the seats behind the goal line if you can, would only cost you one more play.
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loan them Hicks for the Kick off and Kick it to him.
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I thought the clock didn’t start until the returner fielded the kick.
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It doesn’t but a player usually fields a kick along the ground and runs with it. A kickoff into the end zone allows no time to run off.
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Every time the dive got 5, 6, 7 yards, I kept going back to Pruitt talking about slimming down the D line to face the spread.
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He needs to address that this offseason. UF and Tech pushed this line around.
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You are right about what happened with stopping the option but there was nothing different than any other year, so how did it require a significant change? It is “man up”, play assignment football, and be prepared for a long physical assault. I worry that we aren’t tough enough up front for a direct assault, hope we don’t draw Wisconsin in a bowl. Our DTs and ILBs were the issue on the A gap dive and we had no answer, surprising. As I mentioned yesterday, this seems to be a man issue going forward as next season we will face power running games against SC, Bama, Ga. Southern, Tech, and possibly Florida. It seems to we lost weight on the front to deal with and Auburn type offense, and that worked but we got gashed by the run in all three losses.
Understandably it was lost in the discussion of how we lost the Tech game but how about the execution on that FG, Les Miles’ style! Still only got three points out of that but Morgan showed some wheels and we didn’t capitalize on it. Who would have known our OL would fail against GT’s front group? Looked like we needed to pass to throw the run game open Saturday, and what happened to getting Rumph more targeted throws? He should be our weapon in the RZ.
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I agree. Shame we can’t be talking about the fake FG turning the game for us. It was a great call and perfectly executed.
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DTs were disappearing on every dive play. I started focusing on them when it was obvious GT was going to that well on every play, but it actually was hard to keep track of our DLinemen after the snap. We had no physical presence.
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Mason played a good game under heavy pressure. We had no downfield presence. I appreciate now how good Murray made Michael Bennett look on those possession routes the last few years.
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I wonder if the pooch kick was one of the thing Richt learned during that offseason spent getting on the cutting edge of college football?
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Come on, man. Yes, the pooch kick was FUBAR, but we’ve seen a lot of incredibly ballsy special teams calls over the last few years. The same guy called the field goal fake yesterday.
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Which, in my mind at least, makes the pooch all the more maddening and incomprehensible. How is it the same guy makes those two calls in one game? Makes no sense to me.
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I suggest a new name for Mark Richt to express his conservative style:
Pooch Kick Richt
That way, we’ll never forget GT 14′.
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Mac the difference in how the D perfomed this year against GT is explained by the two goal line fumbles..and even the long fumble return by Swann. The defense never got to catch it’s breath. Georgia drove the field so fast and then didn’t even get the points…and GT got the ball back twice. Ironically, even techs fumble and Swann’s long return played into GT’s hands..it put a gassed defense right back out there to be further exhausted.
Go up 21 to zip (without the fumbles) and it’s a whole different game. Literally two seconds of play (how long it takes to fumble twice) determined the outcome of this game.
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Don’t disagree, those two fumbles set up what came later, and impacted the psyche of both teams. I get the time of possession back to back in the third quarter but if you are stopping the run, you never get those long drives, right? And what happened to the rotation of players that we expected to prevent relying on tired players? So I think you are right about us being tired late in the third, but there also seems to be a flaw in our defense against power runs, something systemic, it happened in all three losses.
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Mac, from my vantage point, they weren’t running the classic triple option dive at the A gap. They slanted the dive at the weak side linebacker whoever it was in that spot. Pruitt NEVER adjusted to it by going to a balanced, classic 4-down look.
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I think it is as simple as running out of bodies on the D line…pretty obvious, really. Maybe Pruitt actually does not stuff, cause he worried about our defensive depth early on.
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Scorp, I agree with you to a point. It didn’t look like we changed our alignment with existing players to cover the linebackers and keep the o-line off them. Our guys were out of gas in the 2nd half. The following guys played in the line:
Thornton (start), Drew (start), Bailey, Johnson, Dawson (no Atkins, DeLoach, or Mayes – don’t know if any of them are hurt)
This was probably not the game for the 2-5-4 alignment we used against Auburn.
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and you gotta give TheJohnson his due…he found the soft spot and kept hitting it till it broke.
It appeared to me this Tech team is simply better than most Tech teams, especially on defense.
The most frustrating part of this loss to Tech is that Tech had their Reggie Ball moment and we still lost the game.
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Very true, unfortunately, very true.
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Well, we had our Mark Richt moment which trumps a Reggie Ball moment.
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You are right ee, he slanted that dive play all day and we never made an adjustment. Baffled by that, we just got gouged repeatedly in the 2nd half.
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Sigh.. Two thoughts. First, their QB running up the middle to set up the field goal was inexcusable. Second, I gotta give credit to the Tech kicker. Wow! What a kick!
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Yep, the Tech kicker nailed it. But it was so close, if we’d just stopped Thomas two yards shorter, the kick would’ve missed by a yard. Still, a clutch kick.
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Kevin Butler was critical of the fact that we didn’t rush our interior line on the kick. He said it appeared our defenders were told to expect a fake and in light of the fact that we got through their line a couple times and it was an extremely long kick, this was a poor decision.
I’m not smart enough to notice all that stuff, but if they had a run a fake and scored a TD, we’d have gone just as much ape shit.
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“I’m not smart enough to notice all that stuff, but if they had a run a fake and scored a TD, we’d have gone just as much ape shit.”
+100
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Is it too much to ask that coaches retain the same memory as fans? As soon as we had that awful squib, my first thought was the 2001 Tennessee game. Similar situation – we outplayed a favored opponent, they stole it at the end to take the lead with less than a minute, and then Fulmer squibbed it. I believe McMichael fielded it and brought it up to the 40. Boom, we were back in business.
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I too was reminded of that game. The UT fans were screaming about that for a year as they were a better team and saw their coach snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
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Now we know how they felt. How’d that end up working out long term for ol’ Phil? Time passes but some things you don’t forget. Unless you’re Mark Richt who apparently forgot the end of the 2001 Georgia-Tennessee game.
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Don’t ever call a timeout to ice the kicker when the other team is out of time outs and scrambling to snap the ball for the game winning kick.
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This. Though it isn’t really being discussed much I don’t think Tech would have gotten the kick off in time. Five yards. We helped them out. Not to mention that, like the pooch kick, icing the kicker never works. Never. Honestly. I’m an old man and I have never seen it work. I have, however, seen it help the kicking team over and over again.
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The analysis on this board is second to none.
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I’m real curious as to why we ran the tunnel screen to Malcom Mitchell only twice that I can recall. Once on the very first drive for a 30 yard gain, and then again on the final touchdown drive for about 15 yards. Once Tech made it clear that they weren’t going to let the Chubb show continue after the 1st quarter, we didn’t make very good perimeter adjustments. The tunnel screen was part of the perimeter game plan, but we must have forgotten during the middle of the game.
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The ;pick at the end of the game was a tunnel screen, no? Could be wrong, because I only watched that play once.
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No, it was a run/pass read option. It was a deep slant/post that was picked. The tunnel screen is thrown at or just over the line of scrimmage with linemen and/or backs pulling out to set up the tunnel for the receiver to run underneath.
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I’m sure not everyone will agree, but I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a simple coaching philosophy I believe every smart coach should use and one that I wish Richt would employ:
In a close (one possession) 4th quarter game, make the same offensive and defensive calls that you would normally call at any other time. It is that simple. At the end of the game, trust your players and coaches to play the game as you have prepared them to all season and all week. Richt’s mistakes always seem to come from trying to do something different as the end approaches (passive, conservative play-calling; passive, prevent defenses; squib and pooch kicks, etc.). Moreover,I think it messes up the players psyche and the way they play–making them tentative, uncertain, tight.
There are a few simple exceptions: If you can actually run the clock out on offense, then run the clock out. When defending the LAST play, sure go ahead and play a deep prevent. Otherwise, play football the same way you’ve been playing it the rest of the damn game. If the other team makes a great or freak play to win against our reg D….I, for one, can live with that. If we make a turnover on offense playing our reg. O…I can live with that, too.
What maybe bothers me the most about the end of regulation is that Georgia Tech didn’t really have to do anything special or amazing in order to “miraculously” tie the game. Their opportunity was completely created by the Georgia coaches different “special” treatment of the end-of-game scenario. Some coaches have a knack or special instinct for the right call at crunch time. Mark Richt has proven that he most certainly does not–so he should just stick to routine and let the players decide the outcome.
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Player personnel and roster management. Now how could that game had gone if there had been a Josh Harvey-Clemons, Trey Matthews, and Jonathan Taylor in the D.
I’d say roster management matters.
Another thing the HC needs to do. Clean up his damn sidelines. Way too many non-essential people along with the team and coaches.
Are the players getting last minute instructions and coaching when they go out in the closing minutes and seconds of games like that. Or are they distracted and not focused.
Last defense play call was bad from the beginning. Not enought pressure on a QB who does not throw that much. Everything on Tech’s play rides with the QB. He is sitting on the far hash mark and the boundary is defender. Why not try to rush him and keep his passing lanes blocked from sight or closed. Too much playing the pass here.
And if Marshall was dressed out, why not play him. He will leave after next year anyway. And did Douglas get any carries? But Bobo burned thru Chubb on that first drive.
And the last 2 years un Grantham were not good recruiting years for his staff.
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You think J. Taylor should be chalked up as a matter of roster management? Hoo, boy.
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You’re right. I believe the offseason attrition was all necessary with the one exception of JHC. I think he would have made a difference on this team.
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BEST READ ON GAME YET. OF COURSE, THIS COMMON SENSE APPROACH HAS NO PLACE IN UGA FANS MINDS.
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I, too, hate losing to Tech. But given a choice of beating the living hell out of Auburn and losing to Tech, or the reverse, I’ll take it as it happened this year. The Auburn ass kicking did me more good than any win in recent memory.
And as distasteful and discouraging as Saturday’s loss was, I wish we would plug into the energy source (or food source or xxx source) that Tech utilized on Saturday. They simply refused to lose. We let them hang around until the momentum shifted in their favor, then out of their favor, but they refused to give in. It’s odd saying that we should emulate something from Tech, but unlike their previous history with us they had a mental and physical toughness Saturday in the late going that we sometimes can’t seem to find. And it would do us a lot of good to not only find it but make it into a habit.
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