… probably isn’t what you might expect. Here’s what Richt said in response to a question about his future plans:
Mark Richt: “I’ll say this — if and when I do coach again, I’m looking forward to coaching again in terms of being more hands-on. I miss coaching quarterbacks, I miss calling plays, I miss that part of it. Whether it’s in the role of head coach, coordinator, quarterbacks coach, whatever it is. If in fact I choose to do that I’d be really excited about coaching QBs again and getting in the middle of coaching offensive strategy. Not that I wasn’t in it, but I wasn’t calling it. And I think I’d be more apt to do that again.”
Geez, if that’s what you missed, why didn’t you do something about it, especially this season after Bobo left? You could have taken the OC job back and hired a special teams coach, which probably would have made a lot of people happier, including yourself, it sounds like.
Get The Picture 
I thought the same thing. I would have liked to see how that turned out.
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Maybe the AD’s firm recommends him based on those comments!
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Nah, I doubt they care what I think.
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We’ve managed to make Tennessee look classy and level headed. If there is such a thing as karma, we’re really screwed.
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Yep.
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Richt was classy as always during today’s press conference, but that’s the one thing he said that I did not like. It could also be a message to potential employers that he’s going to recommit himself to doing something he’s very good at.
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Hey, the dude is allowed to change his mind in light of new evidence. I think most around here would agree that Schotty’s one season represented some fairly compelling evidence that maybe he should handle things himself until he really knows that he’s got someone who can handle the job.
Richt wants to win, and probably thought a seasoned NFL OC gave him a better chance to win than himself. He was very likely wrong, but it wouldn’t have mattered any way. Even with an excellent OC, this team would have been lucky to be 9-3 with Lambert and no Chubb. They just happened to be extremely lucky.
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Exactly. That first offensive play of the second half of the GT game wasn’t a Schotty play. It was a Richt play, obviously, and the team had to have practiced it to run it in the game. I think Richt has had a lot of hands-on work with the offense the past month, and maybe he was, you know, coaching his new OC on how to be successful in this league. It’s always better if you can retrain an existing guy rather than start over with a new one. Just a shame. The whole thing is just a shame. I’ll get behind the new guy because it’s not his fault, but I will miss Mark Richt.
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CMR will always be classy. I do think that looking back he sees where he went wrong. He followed the blue print of his mentor and became less hands on and more of a program CEO. With Bobo there, I think it worked. CMR was kinda his mentor. CMR should’ve shit canned the OC role, took it himself and hired a special teams coach. I love the man. If a few breaks go UGAs way over the years I really do think they were maybe not the best team but were close to and were playing the best at the end of the year in 3 different seasons. 15 seconds more and we win in 2012. I think the years we played in the sugar bowl we would have beaten anyone in front of us. But if if and buts……..Damn good dawg. Damn good dawg. Next in line has a hell of a job in front of him. Talent and facility’s are in place. No excuses. Good luck Kirby.
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If Mark Richt had done what you said above, CJ, Mark Richt would still be the HC of the University of Georgia football team.
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Richt blames Bobo!
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Either that, or he lost control of the OC job. 😉
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I would like to see him end up at UVA.
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I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
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Just out of curiosity, where would you have a problem with? No coach has ever been fired like this before, coming off potential consecutive 10 win seasons and consistently winning 70% of his conference games for 15 years. Isn’t that about the biggest ‘screw you’ that UGA could have given him? Why does he owe us anything?
I have no problem whatsoever with Richt going to any one of our rivals, including Georgia Tech, if he feels it is a good fit.
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The good Senator is a UVa alumnus, I believe. That’s why he’s saying he wouldn’t have a problem with it.
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Ah, right! Had forgotten that.
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John Cooper got fired like that. tOSU hired Tressel and hasn’t been the same since. They’ve won 2 titles and played for a total of 5. They’ve lost 2 regular season games in the last 4 years. That’s the results we hope for.
It could turn ugly (see both UTs), but it could be Ohio St., too. We won’t know. Glad to have called Richt our guy for 15 years, so proud of his graciousness, and excited for the next phase. You don’t have to pick a side.
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John Cooper’s last two seasons were 6-6 and 8-4, including 8-8 in conference and unranked. That’s why this is unprecedented.
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you’re right.
We should’ve fired CMR after the 6-7 and 8-5 years of 09 and 10
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Should have fired his ass after Knoxville in ’07. I’m still pissed about that one. My love for CMR died that day. He’s never been the same since.
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I think this is a perfect example of the insanity of this move: ‘I wish we had fired a coach during a regular season that required us being leapfrogged in the polls without losing to keep us out of the national title’.
What can you do in the face of such emotional irrationality and impatience? Why not just fire every coach the instant he loses his first game?
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Forgot to use my irony font but still…
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only thing worse than UT 07 was…UT 06…plus UT 09….plus UT 15.
ugh, I’m gonna go puke.
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Might as well add in 05 and get the complete set of losses in Richt’s 10-5 career record against them.
Against Tennessee, a program that had dominated us like toddlers for 20 years and might even still have the series record even with Richt going 10-5.
You think you are going to puke now? Wait until you have to endure what the market gives us as coaches for the next 10 years. You deserve every second of it.
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course we beat them in 05, but if you knew what you were talking about it would make a difference.
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Haha, ok, because the exact year makes a difference.
I really owe people like you a debt of gratitude. I don’t really get into schadenfreude for any school but Tech, because they have a magical place called StingTalk where all of their most misanthropic cynical fans have decided to congregate.
Now I get to add my own school to that list. The sting of any of the many, many losses we will now endure will be lessened knowing that the faction of dawgdom that brought on this horror is learning a valuable lesson.
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No Rick. They won’t learn.
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The perfect place for him and it would be nice if he won the NC at Uva. There is a talent base there that Beamer used to own when he was competitive. Give the Uva crowd 10 wins a year and Jesus wouldn’t have to come get them they would walk to heaven.
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I read that the reason cmr didn’t sign his contract was that it had a clause requiring him to not speak out religiously during school functions. I imagine UVA would want the same thing. Do you think that could be overcome in Charlottesville. My daughter is a UVA law graduate and she says they want cmr bad but wonders if the culture up there hasn’t changed so much that he would have issues with his testimonial ways.
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I have no idea. But I think he’d be a good fit.
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That’s what they are hoping for up there. The fact is that cmr could have his choice of any open coaching job in the country and 90% of the ones that aren’t open.
There is one person that started this chain of events and one person only. SOS strikes again. If he doesn’t leave Carolina then Kirby Isn’t their guy and cmr stays around at least one more year… probably three or four until Bobo is ready to come back after we win a couple sec titles with Eason.
As i said before I would be shocked if Eason is here in January. He won’t follow cmr to Virginia but he would go to Austin in a skinny minute. What a cluster.
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God help us all if he ends up at Mizzou.
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He’ll still get Boochsmacked.
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Or Sakerlina.
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There too.
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Saw that my first thought was you may have kept your job.
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Agree. At yesterday’s meeting if he said Schotty is out and we’re getting a full time ST coach, he might have put up a better argument for keeping the job.
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I’m wondering if he didn’t do just that.
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I was a little disappointed in the mention of being a qb coach or coordinator. It smacked of a man who lacks a little confidence after being fired. The man is a head coach. Go ahead and be a head coach, just one who calls his own plays.
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I interpreted is as still being a head coach, just being more involved in the QB coaching and playcalling like he was his first few years. Don’t think he was talking about being a coordinator or position coach.
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He actually did make brief mention of those positions. It just felt like he was selling himself short.
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Sorry, just re-read the quote. He did mention other positions. When I was watching the press conference though, it definitely came across as he was more referring to doing it as a head coach. He talked about it more than once in the press conference, and I definitely didn’t get the impression he’d be looking at something less than a HC job. Only way I could see him doing that is if he decided to give the NFL a shot.
My money is on him taking a year off though. We’ve talked about it lots here, the dude has flat out looked burned out for the past 2-3 years. Surly, cranky, looked like he was bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. Even talked in the presser about having a feeling of relief right now. I think a year off would do him good, then you know there’d be no shortage of suitors after that, should he choose to jump back in.
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Dooley has the perfect counter argument though:
“For the first five years I was very hands on myself, coaching quarterbacks, but I saw as time when on and they demanded more time, I was given less time,” Dooley said. “So at that point I made the decision that Mark obviously made with Mike Bobo after a while. And that’s the thing you miss as a head coach, is the hands on coaching.”
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If UGA hires Smart, it is going to need a good offensive coordinator.
There are about 100 reasons this is a terrible idea and no one involved would consider it, but I’m just saying.
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I dig what you’re burying.
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He’s a QB coach at heart. He probably should have taken that back. After reading the full transcript, I got the impression that all of the other BS that goes with the job and the money took away from what he really wanted to do — coach football.
My question is whether an NFL team would consider him as an OC and QB coach almost as a trial.
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He wouldn’t do that. You and I both know he wants to mentor and teach young people, to mold them personally as well as professionally. Not so much of that in the NFL.
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I know, but the lessons he learned through the Paul Oliver tragedy could be good for those guys at the next level.
I imagine he would want to stay at the college level, teach the game, and mentor young guys.
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I heard this as well, but I took something completely different from his remarks. It sounded to me like he was saying he had too many additional responsibilities (above and beyond being the head coach) and had to give up some things. He even said something about wanting more support on the front end or something like that if he were going to coach again. I thought it was a not so veiled shot at “The Georgia Way”. Maybe I was off base about that.
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He even said something about wanting more support on the front end….
Yeah I think that was later on, in a similar answer. Said if he was going to take that on again, he’d make sure he had the right support in certain areas first.
I’m not sure if he meant that as a dig as the administration (that would have been during Dooley’s tenure, not McG’s), or just speaking from a level of experience now, knowing what he would need to have to make it work. I think it was the latter. Because another time he talked about how much he didn’t know when he first got hired, as far as what all would be demanded of him.
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My guess is that’s as close as you’ll ever see Mark Richt come to throwing someone under the bus. He knows Schottenheimer (and Ramsey being a bust) ultimately got him fired. Had he coached the O this year, he’s probably still around. Even if it was just as bad in the W-L department, he wouldn’t be tied to a 3-year contract with a terrible OC. That was a major problem going forward.
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I wonder what he and Shotty were thinking Lambert would bring to the table?
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Exactly what he did: the best option at the position.
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Yeah. They were thinking he was better than Bauta and Ramsey, which he clearly was.
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Perhaps. We will never know for sure. I think if Bauta’s strengths were utilized properly it might have resulted in a different outcome. In any event I’m sure Bauta is gone and probably Ramsey too.
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Probably not as much as Golson?
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Maybe he was talking to Saban, who would clearly like to strangle Lane Kiffin. Eason would go with Richt to bama.
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Saban and Richt? The best defensive mind in college football matched with one of the best offensive minds in college football? That would be downright scary. Saban respects Richt, and I think the feeling is mutual.
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Don’t stop there.
Let’s see, Smart to UGA, Saban strangles Kiffin, and Pruitt and Richt to Bama as defensive and offensive coordinators at $2 million each.
😎
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I think that scenario would bring the torches and pitchforks out in front of GM’s office. 🙂
If Saban knew he could get the money, I would imagine he would make it happen.
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I think we can kiss Eason good bye…
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I’m not worried about what an 18 year kid decides to do. Ramsey was a four star…………only about half make it. There’s lot of QB’s out there
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I’m in support of the change, but won’t lie, I’ll be a little bummed if it means losing Eason. For the most part I have the same attitude as you about recruiting, and I do not subscribe to the theory that you should keep a coach just because of his incoming recruiting class. But (contradiction alert) while there’s no such thing as a “can’t miss” prospect, I do believe Eason is a “can’t miss” prospect, or at least as close to one as you can be.
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Tony Eason (Dad) was a 1st round pick, and a few years later led New England to a super bowl – not a small accomplishment. If the apple falls anywhere near the tree in this case, Jacob ought to be pretty special.
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Jacob’s dad is not that Tony Eason. He played WR at Notre Dame for Holtz.
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Doh! We’re in more trouble than I thought.
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Some good ones under their very noses.
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Have you watched film on Eason?
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No, but I saw Matthew Stafford live and in color.
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I have and he’s good. That said, I think we have two guys on the roster already who are just about as good as Eason–Nick Robinson and Sam Vaughn. If Eason goes elsewhere (and why wouldn’t he?) give one of them the keys. Couldn’t be worse than the QB play we had last season.
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Did yo notice that with less than a minute and a half left, up by 9 against a tired Auburn defense, that Saban was pissed that Jr. didn’t call a timeout to avoid a 5 yard penalty? He wanted to choke him. The guy is so driven…is such a perfectionist, that it’s no wonder that he wins. He wants and demands and usually gets a full effort from everyone as long as there is one tick left to play.
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I missed that, but I thought only head coaches are allowed to call timeouts? Either head coach or a player on the field. I could be wrong, but I think that’s the case, don’t think assistant coaches can call them.
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Saw that…thought that Kiffen had perfect coverage for what they were running (2 wide safeties) and was hoping Coker got the snap off. Saban was sure pissed though. My guess was that he couldn’t see the coverage over the line though…
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Why has no one asked McGarity if he will invest in the new coach’s staff and commit to them more than he did for coach Richt. We should not be 25 million different than Bama on football spending. It’s time for our AD to commit to the G.
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Because he’ll say this day is about Coach X and that’s a conversation between the 2 of us …
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I took from it that he wants to coach football and is tired of the grind that comes with running a big time program which is doing everything but coaching football. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him do something like his son did in going from Clemson to Mars hill.
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Exactly what I was thinking.
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Bobo could proably use a quality QB Coach & OC (Calling The Plays).
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Maryland has already contacted Coach Richt.
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Sitting here watching the press conference, I am so sad that Richt is gone.
I totally think it is the right move, but I can’t help it. It makes me sad. I really wish CMR had been able to win more titles and stay until he wanted to retire.
I still wonder/worry if the real problem is not CMR but is a complete rot at the core of our athletic department that hamstrings CMR and staff. I hope that is not the case.
I am really going to miss having CMR on the sidelines representing my team.
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Mizzou would be a really good fit for him too. Would be very surprised if they don’t reach out to him (unless they already have their man).
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