On Bruce Feldman’s list of top five underachieving college football programs, that is. (It’s his response to Mandel’s list from the other day.)
To be fair, his criticism extends well beyond the Richt era. (Amusingly, Mandel disagrees with him, mainly because of the program’s performance under Richt. Even better, he’s still whining about our criticism over his stupid “kings” rankings.)
Definitely worth a listen.
Get The Picture 
Well, you gotta be # 1 at somethin!
Feldman is off on the analysis of the states of Georgia vs Florida. We’ve always competed with Clempsun, AU, UA as well as FSU for talent in Georgia, similarly to UF, Miami, FSU competing for talent in Florida. He fails to make mention of how close those schools are to the state of Georgia and how much closer AU and FSU are to some of the most fertile recruiting grounds in the state.
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I agree with that. But it’s hard to argue with his point about the program not having more than one national title to show for itself in the last 35 years.
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Teams with just 1 National Title in the last 35 years.
Michigan
Notre Dame
Oklahoma (well 1 in the last 30 years)
Tennessee
Texas
Georgia
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Your point being Georgia has company? Okay.
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No real point, was curious if there were other such teams and who they might be. So yeah UGA has company.
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See, I think ND is really the biggest underachiever, plus all the others on your list above are worse than Georgia.
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Oklahoma has 2 in 35 years ’85 and ’00. Only Georgia has to go back 35 years for a national championship. The rest have been more recent and have more national championships, many more, all time than Georgia.
I hate it, but underachieving is apparently part of “The Georgia Way”.
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One championship in the last 35 years is actually the most generous way you can state Georgia’s situation. You could also say one National Title in the last 73 years or also zero national championships in the last 34 years.
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A tortured number will say anything.
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Breaking this down a bit…
Past 35 years takes us to 1980.
We won a title or were competing during the Herschel era but let’s be real about the talent on those teams as whole. We played smart and got the most out of what we surrounded Herschel with, No underachievement here, so lets move to 1985+ and beyond.
1986 brought Jan Kemp and the ensuing self-flagellation (I so miss “working to get butter” with Ray Goff), so take out the mid 80s and 90’s because you can’t underachieve if you aren’t even participating.
This brings us to 2001 and the Mark Richt era, the decline of Fulmer and Spurrier to the ‘Skins and Saban to the Dolphins. From 2002 thru 2005, we looked like we were waking up but always a frustrating loss that kept us from the title game. Here, during this brief period, the argument can be made for underachieving but again we were not out-recruiting and did not have the same level of talent of Pete Carroll and Mack Brown teams.
Then in 2005 Urban shows up at Florida and wins a title in 2006, Miles gets LSU cooking in 2007 and Nick to Bama and the 2008 Blackout game, and we haven’t been the top dog in the conference since. It’s hard to make the statement that you underachieving when you aren’t putting more talent on the field are getting outspent and out-gunned at the administrative level. Auburn is the single outlier, having clearly sold their soul to the devil as there is no other explanation other than dubious ethics and luck for their ability to appear in a title games they have no business being in.
So if you want to say we’re No #1 for not raising our bar to our potential, I’ll be first in line. But as for underachieving, we’re probably getting fair results based on what we put into the program compared with our competition.
For the first time since Jan Kemp, it looks like we might have decided to ante up and go toe to toe with resources and roster management. We’ve seen the state double in population and homegrown talent since Herschel. If now, we’ve actually gotten serious about competing at the highest levels of the University then the results on the field will settle the underachievement conversations..
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So, for only four of the last thirty years, you think we have underachieved? I’d love to have you as my boss doing my annual reviews.
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No I think I said that with the exception of those 4 years there have been other teams in the SEC that would generally be considered stronger overall than us. We’re probably playing closer to our talent. Very good but usually a little below the consistent favorites. It’s not like we hear our names often as consensus top 5 preseason, forget front runners. You can’t underachieve when you aren’t the favorites, if you win as the underdog then you are overacheiving. Occasionally lesser teams get lucky and things break their way like LSU with 2 losses. We haven’t been lucky but luck is not a strategy for success either. We’re mostly known for blowing a game every year we should win, not for blowing titles we’re favored to win.
I did say that we were number 1 with regards to not putting the resources and commitment behind the program to get it to the point where we can say we’re underacheiving if we aren’t playing for the title or in the playoffs more often than not.
Statistically we are probably playing at or above historical average. We’re a top 5-10 +/- type program, not a consistent top 5. We still have some program building to do to before we talk about underacheiving.
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Hmmm…No program has done less with more. I have to agree there. GA has some of the best talent in the nation!
Auburn & Bama raid Georgia on the regular….I mean look at the state of Alabama. There is NOTHING in the state. No pro football, basketball, or baseball….All they got is Auburn & Bama. Hell, half of Auburn’s team is from the state of GA. You gotta go somewhere that has more than one high school per county to recruit & seeing as how Kirby knows GA, well you get it too….Clemson, Tenn, & SC are now on the GA train too. It’s (GA) the hot bed for high school football in the southeast where players are being “developed”. Talent across the board can be found throughout metro GA where it is speckled in some other states. The talent is there…what you do with the talent once you get it…we’ll, that’s called coaching. If Chris Peterson at Boise State (with a #50 recruiting class) can put a top ten team together….why the hell can’t UGA get over the hump. It all goes back to the coaching.
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also wondering why this isnt showing up on my phone.
I subscribe to that podcast..it is generally pretty good. feldeman seems to love QBs and west coast teams, but other than that good podcast.
also shutdown fullcast and solid verbal are great college football podcasts.
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His numbers are cherry-picked….he twice mentioned 2 SEC titles in 32 years….well, it’s also 2 of the last 13 and 5 of the last 35, which equates to approximately 35% of possible titles…..I usually agree with Bruce’s take on things, but according to his criteria there should be about 10-15 teams ahead of us in the “underachieving” camp….while approximately 80 teams get a pass because they don’t have anything expected of them. How about Texas A&M and Clemson and Notre Dame as serial underachievers?
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I think his point is that with all the resources and talent, Georgia is the #1 underachieving program and that’s sort of hard to argue with. We are proud of how many NFL players we produce and we trumpet those numbers to anyone who will listen. The flip side of that is; we don’t do much with that talent while we have it. There aren’t many programs with better facilities, more money, better talent than Georgia and the ones that are our equal in those things generally win more championships than we do.
A&M and Clemson don’t have the resources we do and Clemson is a much smaller school in a podunk town that pretty well equals our level of success. Notre Dame is also much smaller than Georgia and no longer has the recruiting advantage it did decades ago. I’m not saying these schools don’t underachieve, but they don’t have the embarrassment of riches Georgia has either.
In my mind, the real rival for #1 would be Texas. They have more natural advantages than Georgia and it could be argued they have done less with their advantages than we have.
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What always gets me is the assumption that if a kid is within the state lines, Georgia should get him no problem. Is a South Georgia kid, one hour from FSU, going to automatically favor UGA? How about a Warner-Robins kid just over the line from Auburn? Or a Dalton or an Augusta kid? Even the Athens area is a stone’s throw from Clemson. You don’t find the equivalent to this situation, with major football-serious universities, anywhere else. People just look at the state map, see nothing else but GT, and figure it’s a walk in the park for our recruiting.
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Agree, and the numbers guarantee we will lose some to other teams. Georgia can only sign 25 a year, if we signed all 25 out of Georgia every year, that would still leave dozens of good players we couldn’t sign that would go somewhere else.
That said, recruiting and talent is not and has not been a problem for Georgia for decades now.
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Recruiting has absolutely been a problem for us. Our O-Line depth and consistency has been an issue for quite some time.
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Those are self inflicted wounds. Our head coach’s penchant for self imposed scholarship restrictions probably cost us the 2012 championship. We’ll never know, but maybe a couple of those 6 or 8 scholarships he decided not to use in ’11 may have given us a little depth at a position we might have needed for the Bama game where we had something like 58 recruited scholarship players available. Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to give scholarships to those walk ons that “worked hard”, I like to think a couple, or more, three star defensive linemen or defensive backs or offensive linemen might have worked hard too and gotten good enough to get some playing time and rest the starters a little.
The talent we have gotten has been very good to great. What has been done with it has not. We don’t get the underachieving label unfairly I’m afraid.
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You make a real point about the undersigning causing a depth problem. That manifested itself specifically in the 2012 SECCG when Bama ran all over a UGA D-line and LBs, gassed because they didn’t have sufficient reserves to keep the starters fresh for the final quarter when the game was on the line.
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I was talking to a Bama guy yesterday who mentioned that there are always Georgia guys on other teams in the SEC and ACC. Since he’s a Bama guy, the only number he can count to (I imagine) is 15*, so he didn’t understand that we can’t sign every kid in Georgia (unlike Bear Bryant could back in his heyday).
He also said that Richt always loses a game he shouldn’t, conveniently forgetting that the same can be said of Saban in every year he’s been at Alabama, especially in the past few years.
I don’t disagree that UGA is a chronically underachieving team, but that’s a systemic issue that isn’t easy going to be fixed. We are NOT a great program; we are simply a very good one, and we wouldn’t have any national championships if one of the greatest players ever hadn’t decided to come to play for us.
And don’t let me get started on the Dooley legacies who cry and moan about Richt; as much as we revere him and love him, he’d be just another very good coach if he hadn’t had Herschel Walker.
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“And don’t let me get started on the Dooley legacies who cry and moan about Richt; as much as we revere him and love him, he’d be just another very good coach if he hadn’t had Herschel Walker.”
What kind of imbecilic statement is that? The fact is that Coach Dooley DID recruit, retain, and utilize the skills of Herschel Walker (among others) from 1980-1982 with great success. Does that somehow diminish him as a Hall of Fame coach? Would you argue that Red Auerbach was somehow diminished because he had Bill Russell through the great Celtic run? Or that Bill Walsh was nothing without Joe Montana? Or FDR was an otherwise losing CIC without Marshall, Nimitz, or McArthur? Good grief, man!
Have another beer.
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Also not mentioned is that FSU is Free Shoes ThugU, Auburn is All In ATM Univ, UTe and UF are get out of Jail Free Schools , and Clemson is Brown Bag O’ Dead Presidents on the back porch national champions.
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Yeah, everyone else runs dirty, cheating, criminal infested programs. We are paragons of virtue and purity. If you added Georgia to the list of programs you listed, where would be land in the list of schools with a reputation for having thug/criminals on the team?
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…where would WE land…
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+10. Never heard that about Clemson. What about 🆘<< SOS & SC?
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So. Skeptic is Bruce Feldman. I never would have known.
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I’d disagree that we’re the most underachieving, but it doesn’t help much. We’re still able to be a reasonable and legitimate part of that conversation.
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I think that this question depends upon the metric. Is it the difference between the potential of the program and its results or the potential of the roster and the results? I think that a case could be made that we should consistently be a top 3 sec program and thus a top 5 program nationally. By that speculative measure we’ve historically underachieved. However, the argument that the current coaching staff under performs with the roster it has is usually way overblown. I think our w-l record pretty much mirrors what we have available with a few isolated exceptions. The implosion at Brice Williams in 2012 and the implosion at ut in 2007 do stand out. Those were national title contending rosters that each had a miserable road outing.
Historically it doesn’t help that 1) we had the jan kemp issue and all that entailed or 2) that we compete against programs that have zero compunction against cheating. Many fans suggest that we should join in the cheating in order to compete. I’d rather maintain the current image of under achieving accurate or not. Also the advantages that make being a top 5 perennial program (the population explosion that is metro Atlanta) a reality is relatively new. I remember farms at the corner of jimmy carter blvd. and rock bridge road 35 years ago. In short the advantages that we claim that cmr may have today were not available to Vince Dooley or Wally butts.
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Good point re how one defines underachieving. With respect to whether a team under/overachieves with its current roster, we can also look at another standard–how many times the team loses as a (Vegas) favorite and how many times it wins as an underdog.
In the last five years, Georgia has lost 12 games (out of 21 total losses) in which they were favored coming in. By contrast they have only won ONE game during that time in which they were an underdog (UF in ’12). I think that’s the sort of measurement that sticks in people’s mind when they think of Georgia as underachieving–especially last year when all three losses were when Georgia was pretty heavily favored.
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We’re pretty well know for face plants and losing games we’re favored to win.
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And yet why are we favored to win the majority of our games? Feature or bug that we’re favored to win nearly every game? None of the haters – oops I mean “realists” – have ever been able to address this issue.
Also, EVERYBODY is pretty well known for a face plant. UGA is well known for a face plant to you because you follow them more closely than other teams.
The rhetoric is beginning to hit ThomasBrown levels.
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Flaw is the use of a “national title” as the premise. It was a popularity contest and we weren’t invited SEC is best of the best, and decided on the field. Geography and drive time are more significant in recruiting wars than some line drawn by our forefathers centuries ago.
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