2015: where we’re at.

I’d say Ed Aschoff has a pretty accurate depiction of Georgia’s fan base in the aftermath of the Richt contract extension.

For one of the SEC’s most accomplished coaches in the regular season, Wednesday’s announcement of a contract extension and a raise should have been considered a no-brainer. But when you haven’t won the SEC championship at a school like Georgia since 2005, you can’t blame fans for their uneasiness toward their head coach. Still, for all the negativity that Mark Richt has had to deal with from Georgia fans — some of it is justified — he’s had a heck of a coaching career with the Bulldogs. His .739 winning percentage (136-48 record) ranks fourth among active FBS coaches who have coached at least 100 games in FBS conferences, and he’s had nine seasons with 10 or more wins at Georgia in his 14 years in Athens. But with an extension going through 2019 and Richt now making $4 million a year, the time to win an SEC title is now. The Bulldogs are equipped with the talent to make a strong run through the SEC, and you know those same fans unhappy with the lack of championship swag in Georgia’s trophy cases won’t be pleased with anything less than a title run or two in 2015.

I know there’s a risk of reading too much into finishing top-ten with a nice bowl win, but really, there is plenty for Richt to work with in the coming season.  We may not have expected it in the last preseason, but the 2014 edition of Georgia was good enough to make a run through Atlanta.  It just broke down inexplicably at the worst times.

There’s an offense which will have to break in a new quarterback and offensive coordinator, but still has a strong enough foundation to build upon.  There’s a defense that improved steadily throughout the year, gets the usual bounce from second-year stability under the same staff and is likely to get a major talent infusion in key areas with the incoming class (assuming things hold up, of course).

Richt always says the goal for his teams is to get to Atlanta.  It’s not unrealistic this season.  If he expects it, why shouldn’t we?

Friday morning buffet

It’s a chilly, rainy morning… you got something better to do?

• Patrick Garbin looks at Georgia’s offensive line recruiting efforts.  As you can guess, he doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
• There’s so much rivalry in this lawsuit story, it’s hilarious.
• Bulldog Illustrated reports that mat drills are no more.
• The next lawsuit frontier is breached:  O’Bannon attorney sues NCAA and North Carolina over the academic scandal.
• “We’ll get all the information from him and decide what to do…” Looks like Nick Saban’s got a bookend for Jonathan Taylor.
• And Hugh Freeze has more forgivin’ to do, too.
• ESPN asks a bunch of recruits at the Under Armour All-American Game how much facilities matter in their choice of school, and gets a consensus that it’s not much, because all the big schools have good ones.  Sounds like a good argument for keeping up, and not running ahead of the pack.
• Butch Jones has issues with roster management.
• On the bright side for Tennessee, with offensive coordinator Tim Bajakian leaving for Tampa Bay, the Vols will actually get paid something for a coach’s departure from Knoxville.

Now this is an outfit.

Peeps, I gotta tell you – Rashad Roundtree’s got nothing on Mark Walton when it comes to Bulldog style.

“@F5_DEUCE: Georgia Life Chilling Dawg pic.twitter.com/nflkAmqTp5”

— Dawg Sports (@dawgsports) January 22, 2015

Whoa, baby.  And he’s not even a commitment at this point.  Although, if for no other reason than you’d hate to see those threads go to waste, I hope he changes his mind.

“I’m not going to lie, food played a role in my recruitment.”

I don’t know how you can write an article about the importance of food in hosting recruits without a reference to Willie Williams, but so be it.

Evidently no detail is too small, though.

“We want to know what the kids like before they visit,” Georgia coach Mark Richt said. “What drinks they like? What food they like? There was this one time we found out this guy liked a certain kind of chocolate milk, and we made sure it was there. All of those things are important.”

“… I want to surround myself with those kids I can get in school.”

Interesting saga to trace here:

1. Gary Andersen left Wisconsin for the head coaching job at Oregon State.  He claims he was having a problem at Wisconsin with admission standards.
2. Wisconsin had a commitment from a massive offensive lineman from New Jersey, Sam Madden.  Last week, Madden decommited from a place he had recently proclaimed “I’m staying with Wisconsin, I don’t care who else offers,” because – you guessed it – academics.
3. Madden’s primary recruiter at Wisconsin?  Thomas Brown.
4. And guess where Madden is now scheduled to take a visit this weekend.

Like I said, interesting.

Don’t tell me about it.

One thing from yesterday’s announcement about Richt’s contract extension that struck me was the coach’s statement:

“I appreciate the confidence that Greg McGarity has in the direction of our football program and how we represent the University of Georgia,” Richt said in a statement. “Our staff has an outstanding work ethic and we are committed to the development of our student-athletes on and off the field.”

Unlike when Richt discussed the last round of staff raises with the media, McGarity gets a shout-out.  Of course, that’s in a prepared statement, not an off-the-cuff comment at a presser, so you wonder if it’s merely perfunctory (or maybe even prepared by somebody else to go out in Richt’s name).  But at least the acknowledgement was made.

While we’re on the topic of dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, notice what McGarity had to say about the new support staff positions Georgia is currently seeking to fill.  Or, more accurately, what he didn’t have to say.

The Georgia football offices in the Butts-Mehre building will be filled with more off-field assistants.

The Athletic Association is hiring for seven new positions for the program: two player relations coordinators, four quality control coordinators and a special teams analyst.

Georgia already added an additional strength staff member, giving it five total for the first time since the 2011 season.
What’s going on? Athletic director Greg McGarity referred questions to coach Mark Richt, who was on the road recruiting on Tuesday.

Not a word.  Silence.  Crickets.  Coming from a guy who’s spent a good bit of December loudly proclaiming to anyone in the media who would pull up a chair to listen that he had control over the parameters of spending on the football program and who we know has expressed his share of skepticism about the spending race on support staffs, that’s more than a bit noteworthy.  Perhaps it’s a shining example of the maxim that if you can’t think of anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.

At this point, I don’t care whether McGarity and Richt intend to dance at the weddings of each other’s kids.  They don’t particularly have to like each other for the program to succeed.  But they do have to recognize what’s necessary for the program to succeed and not work at cross purposes.  Or air those cross purposes in public.  Silence is professional.

Again, I don’t pretend to know the specifics of what’s happened behind the scene at Butts-Mehre over the past six or seven weeks.  But it’s clear that the athletic administration has committed to hitching its star to Richt’s wagon.  McGarity may not really be “… very pleased with the direction of our program under Mark’s leadership,” but I have to think he was given the opportunity by Morehead to say what he thought Richt’s immediate fate should be and declined to pull the plug.  Once you cross that bridge, you can’t be in half way.  Like it or not, if you’re McGarity, you just bought in to giving Richt what he reasonably believes he needs to succeed.

I think most of us hope that, with the commitment to resources from B-M, there’s a commitment from Richt to getting Georgia over the hump.  The irony is that if Richt is being held accountable for that, McGarity has to be held accountable for his call not to replace Richt.  If his faith in Richt is rewarded, I have no problem letting him share in the credit.  But if the best we get after this is a continued plateau or even worse, it shouldn’t simply be Richt’s term in Athens that should be questioned.  I wonder how they both feel at this point about being joined at the hip.  Hopefully, they won’t tell anyone about it.

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UPDATE:  Here’s a timely podcast from Emerson and Estes.  I think what they have to say is pretty consistent with what I’ve said here.  I hadn’t considered the point Seth made about Crumley, though.

This, too, is part of the Georgia Way.

Nothing like reading an article about the NCAA investigating academic fraud and seeing your school receive a prominent mention.

In December the NCAA ordered a nine-meet suspension for Jack Bauerle, the head coach of swimming and diving at the University of Georgia, after determining that he had asked a professor to register a star swimmer in a fall independent-studies class after the fall semester had ended.

I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t dredge up the Harricks.  Or Jan Kemp.  Or…

“I guess it’s more about scoring points now than playing defense now.”

We’re living in the time of Nick Saban’s worst nightmare.

Just look at Alabama. This is a team that dominated college football with a very traditional — and successful — offense. But Nick Saban’s defenses have struggled with the spread recently. Johnny Manziel and his high-flying Texas A&M Aggies lit up Alabama for an average of 523 yards and 35.5 points in games in 2012 and 2013. Against Auburn and that uptempo Malzahn spread the last two years, Alabama has surrendered 1,023 yards and 78 points.

Alabama went 2-2 in those four games.

Take it a step further and look at Alabama’s two-game losing streak in the postseason where Oklahoma (spread and tempo) and Ohio State (spread) combined to score 87 points and reeled off 966 yards.

Running quarterbacks, spread and tempo have been weaknesses for Saban’s defenses, so he added all three to his offense this year and watched Alabama set all sorts of offensive records and average 484.5 yards per game (most during his Alabama tenure) and 36.9 points a contest.

“Three or four years ago, Nick Saban was talking about how he didn’t really like [uptempo offense], and the disadvantages to it,” Oregon defensive back Juwaan Williams said. “He’s making the evolution himself.”

Saban doesn’t want to evolve, damn it.  He wants to accumulate more talent than anybody else and then beat the crap out of you with it.  He doesn’t want to win by having to outscore the other guy’s attack.

The problem he’s running into is that he doesn’t have a better angle on defending the spread than anybody else.  And while losing a game or two isn’t a big deal for most college football programs, it’s brutal for an SEC West team expected to make appearances in the CFP annual routines.  That razor-thin margin for error is what’s forcing him to experiment on offense.  Which in turn is an admission of sorts that what Alabama’s been doing on defense isn’t working as consistently as it used to.

It’s a problem across the conference, of course.  It’s just magnified in Tuscaloosa.  And it makes me wonder, if ‘Bama continues to adapt to defending the spread, how Saban defends Georgia’s power running game when his team comes to Athens this season.

Thursday morning buffet

There’s always something to spoon onto your plate.

• Here’s something you don’t see every day – ESPN is suing Notre Dame.
• Ed Orgeron’s voice mail sounds like Ed Orgeron’s voice mail.
• Which colleges spend the most and least on men’s athletics recruiting?
• “The NCAA has surrendered.”  Yeah, that’s the lesson you want Penn State supporters to learn from the Sandusky/Emmert debacle.
• It’s time to acknowledge that Old Spurrier is now a full-blown meme.
• Gentry Estes lists five Georgia players on the spot for spring practice.
• After football, UAB prepares to plead for its Conference USA life.
• Evidently we should be careful throwing stones at the Patriots for deflating footballs.
• The NCAA spent more on Congressional lobbying in 2014 than it did in the three previous years combined.  Gee, I wonder why.

The four million dollar man

Boy, this ought to piss off some of you.

Mark Richt has received a raise and a contract extension.

The head football coach’s contract has been extended two more years, through the 2019 season, and his salary is increased to $4 million effective this season. That’s an increase over Richt’s previous salary of $3.2 million, under a contract signed prior to the 2012 season.

We’ve come a long way from Belk Bowl retirement rumors.

By SEC standards, it’s a middle of the pack deal, but it sends a message of stability which is a good thing for the program and all I really care about.  Now, focus on winning the East in 2015 and take things from there, Coach.