There is a Georgia story. But is anyone going to tell it?

I get it.  A head coach is the face of his program, for better or worse.  So when the media looks at Athens, it looks at Mark Richt.  And when Georgia doesn’t excel, that’s how you get to the ubiquitous hot seat meme.  And when it becomes apparent that, for whatever reason, Richt’s seat simply isn’t that warm, you fall back on the underachiever label.

Andy Staples does a nice job of mashing up the two with this.

"UGA is the best job in CFB & if they don't meet expectations they need to ask some hard questions" – @Andy_Staples pic.twitter.com/QTQ5ONPQWd

— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) August 5, 2015

Now to be fair to Andy, whom I like generally, he doesn’t come right out and say where he’s pointing his finger.  And given that he’s made solid points before about Georgia’s drug policy, it may be that he’s being nuanced by referring to the program and not just the head coach.  If that’s the case, I can’t argue with his sound bite.

But even so, I think Andy’s missing the bigger picture here.  Not that he’s alone in that.  Other than Mark Schlabach, I really can’t think of too many in the national media who commented on the dysfunction surrounding the program at the time of the bowl game.

I’m aware I sound like a broken record on this subject, but the program is in a much different place now than it was seven months ago. And I don’t know how you can judge Georgia in August, 2015 by Georgia in December, 2014 standards.

If, as Andy asserts, Georgia is now the best job in college football, it’s a very recent development.  Because I don’t know too many people who would savor working at a place where the higher-ups are undercutting you in the media and controlling the purse strings in such a way that your defensive coordinator is forced to come out and publicly complain about how that’s negatively impacting recruiting.

This isn’t to predict everything’s going to come up roses for Richt, or that people shouldn’t be held accountable for substandard performance.  (I can hear the cries of “Richt apologist!” already.) But to me, the place to start here is whether Richt can successfully reinvent himself as the man running the show for the second time since 2009.  As I posted here, there aren’t many programs I can think of that have dramatically remade themselves the way Georgia has since 2013, while retaining the head coach.

Ironically, I’m back at the same spot where Staples started.  I agree it’s put up or shut up time.  It’s just that I feel that way about the program as a whole, from top to bottom, not just the head coach.  It’s a complicated tale that deserves more than simply citing a couple of stats about how much high school talent the state of Georgia produces year in and year out.

If this is a story with a boom or bust conclusion, it’ll probably get told in 2017 or 2018, based on how things shake out.  But it’s worth telling now.  Anyone want to give it a shot?

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UPDATE:

@ParrishWalton @MummePoll The senator is absolutely right that you can't point the finger at one person.

— Andy Staples (@Andy_Staples) August 6, 2015

So there’s that, anyway.