I was going to post something about Dean Legge’s post on what went wrong during Georgia’s 2015 season tomorrow — I’d say you “let it go” types can skip it, but we both know you won’t — but since I’ve gotten a few emails about it (and since it appears to be a multi-part story), I figure I’ll throw my two cents in now.
And two cents is probably all it’s worth, to be honest. I don’t know how much more he has to throw out and I don’t want to get into what I heard/know versus what he relates, but I will say that if you want to drill down to the real problem that season, this quote will do very nicely:
“The root of the problem was that Pruitt was running the show,” another player said. “Coach Richt is a non-confrontational guy. He didn’t check Pruitt, and it went from there…”
That was the essence of the frustration with the program going both up and down the chain of command and while there are plenty of folks to point the finger at, Richt and his management style deserve much of the blame. That is all… for now, at least.
Get The Picture 
Legge got some very candid comments from anonymous sources. There were a couple that almost made my jaw drop.
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I can’t say that I was surprised. Glad Richt and UGA have moved on.
Richt is a nice man and I hope everyone involved learned from the situation.
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I have total respect for Mark Richt the man. And I think he was a very good football coach and ambassador for UGA. But I can absolutely see the fatal flaw here, his laissez-faire attitude, which also manifested itself in his roster management. Not every coach has to chug Red Bull and pop forehead veins, but there needs to be an assertiveness about them, so that their authority is never in question. Richt’s own style still succeeded in getting people to follow him who respected his strong character, experience, success, loyalty, etc. But what happens when a hot-headed guy like Pruitt comes along, who doesn’t respect those things nearly as much, who needs to know the limits of his own authority in order to truly thrive, and who challenges you at practice in front of everyone? While you might turn the other cheek w/r/t personal forgiveness, you can’t let the assistant’s very public actions go publicly unpunished. You’ve got to assert your authority in that moment to show that you’re still the Alpha Dog. Richt’s failure to do that ended up being corrosive to his authority.
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Vince asked Bobby Bowden if he had any concerns about Richt.
Answer: Is he tough enough?
At the end of the day though, this is more about Pruitt than Mark. I think Pruitt would run roughshod over a lot of personalities. That’s just who he is.
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No one should confuse Pruitt’s lack of self control with Smart’s fiery personality. Pruitt will shoot himself in the foot in Knoxville. Because it’s who he is. He isn’t another Smart and definitely not another Saban. He will snap with Fulmer breathing down his neck.
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Yeah. Pruitt stepped on toes as the new guy, caused turmoil and it was downhill from there. His talents are now at the dumpster fire to the north and Richt seems to be doing well to the South. I guess the one unintended consequence is that by being disruptive, he outed himself, we got a new staff, new life and a shot at the title.
My appreciation for Pruitt ends there, though. He didn’t get us an IPF. He really didn’t do much else. Richt brought the program out of a couple decades slump and then petered off for a number of reasons. He deservedly got another great opportunity. Pruitt deservedly got a very tough uphill battle. Everyone wins. Sorry, you won’t find me on the Pruitt the Savior vs Richt the deflator train. That’s delusional and, unfortunately, where many seem to reside. It’s also unfortunate how little credit UGAA is given. The folks who go out of their way to discredit Richt rarely mention how McGarity and company left his ass blowing in the breeze on a couple issues. It’s literally taken until this staff for the program to be willing to play hardball like the competition. We are just now joining the elites in facilities and staff and training. Fortunately, we got a HC who spent years at the pinnacle of elite everything to do with cfb and it just so happens he played at Georgia.
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No doubt the bottom-line story about the dumpster fire that was 2015 is that there’s plenty of blame to go around.
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Yes.
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Hoo boy. Senator, you may get your tell all, after all.
I heard from former player directly that Bobo was demanding, rude, and generally a world class asshole that was not well liked by the team. From the way the kid talked, I got the impression that the players on both sides were a little frightened of him. He also said that Richt was universally well liked. I’m just wondering if the team lost it’s disciplinarian when CMB moved on. As much as I bash on Bobo, I’m thinking the leadership “vacuum” (Great post title by the way) he left was as influential to the overall outcome as Pruitt’s insubordination.
As any true leader will attest, If a subordinate challenges you publicly, (in front of your team, crew, platoon, whatever) you have to deal with it in such a manner that no one questions who the fucking boss is, period. Even if it comes down to a me or you scenario, you make damn sure everybody knows who is in charge, right or wrong. It’s not always an easy thing to do, especially for a nice guy. But it is rewarding.
FWIW, this should make for some interesting wasted time this week …….
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There are several quotes in their that many UGA fans will just not understand, mainly the one’s about Bobo running an efficient offense, which was true. I don’t think that we ever have had a coach less deserving of the shit he got than Mike Bobo.
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“Dammitbobo”
It’s like it’s one word.
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Senator, it looks like the book you’ve wanted written about the last couple years for Richt in Athens is finally being written, with quotes!
Regarding the incident with the laissez-faire Richt getting dog cussed by Pruitt, and Pruitt just walking off the field, I don’t ask this as a defense of Richt, but what the heck is he supposed to do there to assert his alpha dog situation? Does he fire him on the spot? Cuss at him with more profane words than Pruitt would pull together? I’ve worked with hot heads with big egos. Ain’t nothing putting the toothpaste back in the tube when the rant begins outside of getting fired. I got to imagine Richt had a WTF moment having likely never experienced something quite like that before. Hashing it out on the field in front of players, coaches, boosters, recruits, etc, also seems a fools errand where all sides end up in a worse spot than before.
That Richt didn’t stomp a mudhole in Pruitt’s backside afterwards, behind the scenes, is a mark against Richt and likely the difference between Richt and Saban(coincidentally probably why one has 6 NCs and the other none).
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Well, what’s not clear there — and that may simply be a factor of this being the first in a series — is that this wasn’t the only incident in which Richt let things slide with Pruitt’s actions.
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ahh, Saint Richt shoulda gone gangster on him. gotcha.
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He should have done it right there in front of the team and anyone else standing close enough to hear it. You may have to raise your voice to be heard, sure, if only to say “Get your ass out of here right now, I’ll deal with you later.” If he doesn’t stop? ” Either you leave or I will have that nice police officer providing security over there escort you from the premises and you WILL NOT come back.” But you better be ready to back it up.
I have seen it done and I certainly respected my foreman much more for it. I have had to do it and the respect garnered from it was palpable. I hate that Richt wouldn’t or couldn’t, and I have a hunch one of the reasons he didn’t was because he didn’t feel covered from above. Looking at you UGAA.
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Totally agree…
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I don’t think Richt needed to out-yell or out-cuss Pruitt to make his point. I’d just tell Pruitt, “You go for a walk and calm yourself down until you’re ready to come back and apologize to me in front of everyone. Or if not, just keep walking.” But that requires a willingness to enforce his demands, which is just what Richt seems to have caved on when it came to the fight in practice.
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I don’t think Richt was a softy in the beginning but too long with Adams made him complacent IMO. Many in Athens say his wife’s illness softened him. He too often publicly stated he would never leave UGA which turned him into an old piece of the furniture in the athletic dept with no clout. DVG in S&C and Willie didn’t help. Then comes a guy like Pruitt who was hired by Bono and Friend who are soon gone. All of it equaled a shitstorm.
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Nah – I think Richt was always a bit soft. Different egos drove the team early on like Brian Van Gorder and a host of coaches that didn’t get along. UGA had a nasty defense and a conservative offense run by Richt in his first years. The offense started to take off as Bobo got more acclimated as OC and reel in big time RBs. Even in the Grantham era though, the alphas on the UGA team were Gurley and guys on defense.
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Those are good points.
Reading through all this just makes me sigh. In addition to some of Richt’s other weaknesses, his HR was abysmal.
He hired (and retained) some really underwhelming assistants. The list is long.
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Wow. I’d say ‘let it go’, but it’s like driving past a car wreck: you just have to look. 😦
I’m afraid to read part 2 about Schottenheimer.
And thank God for Kirby.
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If I remember correctly, Lincoln Riley was interested in the job. He may have taken the Oklahoma OC either way, but I’ll always believe the Schottenheimer hire more than anything Pruitt did was the decision that did Richt in.
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I agree with that; if Schotty hadn’t have been such a disaster Pruitt and CMR might have worked something out eventually, but there were just too many things wrong all over the team.
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…and by the time you get to the end of the season, you have an AD who wanted Richt out going to the President with at minimum buyouts on both Coordinators.
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That 2014 teams was pretty good and we returned a lot of guys, but the 2015 offense was so amazingly bad.
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That’s probably the part I look most forward too. Schottenheimer was such an ill-conceived hire, I’m dying to know the details.
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On the one hand, I can almost understand if Richt’s thought process behind the Schottenheimer hire was something along the lines of “hell, even a boring-ass NFL offense will work just fine when your RBs are as amazing as ours are.” But if that was the rationale, why would we back up the Brinks truck to the tune of $850K? I will never, ever understand what we thought was worth all that money.
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It struck me as a safe hire with some boxes checked. NFL experience? Check. Run oriented offensive style? Check. Connections to NFL legends? Check. Those checkboxes cost money. Sadly, it didn’t work.
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A little off-topic, but I just got a Hartman Fund email about available Georgia Tech and Tennessee tickets. I get the N.A.T.S. because they can’t even fill their own adorable, little Erector Set®; but the Hillbillies?! Does this mean they sent back some of their allotment?
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Yes, that’s exactly what it means.
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Woweewow.
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They know what’s coming.
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I like how they sent the email 5 minutes before the tickets went on sale.
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I am looking forward to all that will come out of this and also not looking forward to it at the same time. How fast would Kirby have fired Pruitt? I wish I could have heard Pruitt’s request to keep his job when Kirby was hired. I bet that was an interesting conversation.
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Smart at this point in his career, would not be an absentee CEO creating the need for Pruitt to step up.
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True. What a strange unraveling.
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While we’re being all conspiratorial, I don’t believe for a second that Kirby wasn’t already on the way to Athens way before any one else knew it other than a select few at B-M. I’m thinking he already had said “I ain’t working with Pruitt” so both CMR , CJP, and Shotty were lame ducks before any of this went down.
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What, you’re not buying McGarity’s search firm story? 😉
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What? You are?
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I don’t think Kirby was already on his way to Athens during Spring practice in 2015
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I’ll bet he was shortly thereafter.
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Richt was dead man walking after the Alabama beatdown. Kirby was licking his chops on the flights out of Ben Epps.
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I think this is right. If we’d beaten UF and got to ATL, maybe; but I think Kirby knew his bet paid off when they left here on that miserable day. UF clinched it. If it didn’t, then almost losing to GaSo must have.
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Kirby wouldn’t have had an issue with Pruitt. Pruitt would have stayed in his lane. I believe there was a softness at UGA that Pruitt couldn’t tolerate. While Richt should have exercised his authority better but I also feel pretty strongly that Pruitt knew some things needed to change in order to compete at the level he’d become accustomed. There is no softness in Smart. There never has been and luckily, never will be. It’s not in his DNA.
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I disagree. Pruitt would have showed his ass and Kirby would have fired him. Which is exactly what I think is going to happen at UT. Pruitt will light up the Great Pumpkin and then we get to watch Rocky Top implode with the force of a dying sun. What fun!
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I’m not usually a soap opera guy, but boy is this juicy as all get out.
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I just want to give the players some credit here. In the midst of that coaching chaos, they managed to pull it together enough to win out after Florida, however ugly it was.
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Yes, and also Bryan McClendon, iirc.
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That team had a lot of DGDs, both players and coaches. I said above that Richt’s flaws limited its success. But it’s also only fair to say that his virtues–viz. inspiring fierce loyalty–also kept that team from mailing it in after UF. Richt set both the ceiling and the floor for that team.
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Well, we won 10 ugly games, embarrassed Spurrier, beat tech, managed not to lose to Penn State, and got Kirby so I’d say 2015 was a dumpster fiery success.
I do wonder what would have happened if Richt would’ve green lit Thomas Brown to step up and beat the crap out of Pruitt when he got sideways.
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“Meanwhile, Richt, who was entering his 15th season as head coach in Athens, had slowly backed away from much of the day-to-day operation of the program.”
This says it all.
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That part’s not all on Richt. Some of that came from B-M time constraints.
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I don’t really disagree but I think the blame for those time constraints should be split 50/50 between Richt and B-M. He was too meek to push back on their nonsense. The guy couldn’t even control his subordinates. He sure as heck didn’t say anything to the people who controlled his employment (see his weak approach to the IPF for years as prime example #1).
Richt and The Georgia Way were soulmates until everything unravelled that fall. He didn’t push them too much and they were able to focus on hoarding money. It was a beautiful marriage until it wasn’t.
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He never signed his last contract extension because of those. How would you have pushed back?
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For starters, I would have had a direct conversation with my AD about the subject and told him that if I’m not allowed to devote the time necessary to running the football program, then I’ll be giving him my resignation. I wouldn’t have continued to work for a year doing things half-assed.
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So if the AD says no to something, you’re going to walk on a $4M/Year contract on the hopes you can get a better job making the same money elsewhere? Takes an unusual sort to walk away from a $20M guaranteed contract.
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Yet we still have Head Coaches changing jobs.
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Your numbers are incorrect. He had 3 years left on his contract at that point and was making $3.3 million/year:
https://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/georgia-football/georgia-mark-richt-working-contract-extension/
He had also made approximately $35-40 million as head coach of UGA over the previous 14 years.
Ask Nick Saban and Kirby Smart what they would have done.
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Saban would move jobs until he lands a job where Forbes would write articles about the power he has over the department.
Hopefully B-M does not let us find out with Smart but I also believe Smart plays the game better than Richt. A top tier P5 head coaching job is about political as you can get without being an actual politician.
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I find it’s generally easier to walk away from $4 million a year if it’s somebody else’s contract.
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Sure it is, especially if your net worth is less than a million or two. But when you’ve made $35-40 million over the last 14 years, that tends to change things.
We’re talking about approximately $10 million. That’s how much was left on his current contract at the time that he didn’t sign the new one. Instead of kicking the can down the road and hoping that you win the passive-aggressive debate over your time that you’re attempting to win, why not force the issue right then and there? His market value was definitely higher at that point as well. If the Georgia Way holds firm, your coaching options are still pretty good (hell, they were good even after the 2015 season).
The fact is that he didn’t want to go anywhere and that hurt his desire to take a stand when he needed to, which was a feature and not a bug to the Georgia Way. Like I said, it was a beautiful marriage until it unravelled.
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Good posts. I totally agree. The Mark Richt Way and the Georgia Way were in a state of symbiosis. In some areas, the Richt Way and the Georgia Way are even indistinguishable.
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Interview for another job.
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I know it’s hard for some of you to believe, but when Richt said he wanted to stay in Athens his entire career, he actually meant it.
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I don’t doubt he meant it, but life changes and employment is not a marriage contract.
He backed his way into a corner without any cards to negotiate nor any drive to fight.
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You are judging him by your personal standards. That ain’t the way it went down.
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That is the way his chosen career path goes down see my post above about politicians.
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Hey, marriage isn’t necessarily forever either brother.
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Sure he did. He just didn’t want to work his ass off (like Saban does) in order to do it. This isn’t hard to figure out once you quit making excuses for the guy.
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You’re right guy Senator. At that point Richt had burned up his leverage to push back following the 2010 season.
The real issue is/was the roster management. I’ve heard that spring/summer camp 2015 was a fucking disaster bc they all started to realize what a hole the 2013 class was leaving. There just wasn’t the talent on the roster that Pruitt in particular was used to seeing.
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If Pruitt thought ‘15 was bad, wait until his team this year actually has to face a non-10rc opponent. I can’t wait for his head to explode.
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As we’ve discussed many times here, Richt’s issues were whack-a-mole from year to year. But I wonder if every coach who’s at a job for 15 years doesn’t have a class that just craters. It’s amazing how much even one bad class can just disintegrate your football team.
I also wonder if they weren’t less cautious about who they signed that year – iirc, that was the first year roster management really came up in in a big way in public b/c it looked like had little depth / were gassed vs Abalama in the SECCG.
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It wasn’t just that the 2013 class vaporized. That would have been bad enough.
It’s that a) it wasn’t very good to begin with, and b) it came on the heels of letting the numbers get down to 68. They needed that class to pan out and pan out quickly because of the holes everywhere, and it didn’t.
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Wasn’t the story that B/M forced Richt to hire an OC… that he wanted to take that part back up and McGarity wouldn’t let him or something to that effect?
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People on here want to make excuses for CMR and his “time constraints.” Listen if you are the Head Football Coach at the University of GA and you are winning football games you get to determine what your time is spent on and what your time will not be spent on. Don’t give me this “B-M time constraints” crap. That shit happened to CMR because he let it happen and he willingly gave up control of the football team and that was his downfall. That and hiring Schotty! Two stupid decisions I hope he doesn’t make at his new gig.
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Willingly or unwittingly he eventually allowed a snowball to build which forced him.
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LMAO. How would you know?
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He was the head coach at UGA for several years back when Electronic Arts was still making NCAA College Football.
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Post of the day! That brought a smile to my face this afternoon.
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Wait, does he have to have “been in the arena” to make observations about how a head coach should define boundaries with an athletic association?
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My frustration with Richt was his stubborn streak and his trust in people around him, players and coaches. He trusted his players to “make a play” and assistants to call the right plays.
Maybe, privately, he saw Pruitts behavior as a feature, not a bug. He could have Pruitt be the cussing, scary guy and let the players be scared of him and Richt could be the good cop to Pruitts bad cop. I dunno, just a thought.
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Good cop/bad cop only works when the one cop doesn’t turn on the other.
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This is pretty much everything I was hoping Andy Staples would talk about in his Dear Andy Mailbag from last week when I asked him the question about, “What really happened,” at UGA in 2015, and instead he took the (understandably) easy way out and just talked about the known surface-level stuff instead.
I can’t wait to read the rest of this series. The only question I would have is why the heck didn’t this come out during Media Days or the week before media days? Can you imagine Pruitt’s press conference then???
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I’ve thought about the timing, too. I wonder if Murray’s comments led Legge to try his sources to see if anyone was willing to talk yet?
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Honestly, what could go wrong in Knoxville?
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I know, right?
POPCORN.
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Reading that just confirms we need to all thank your lucky stars that goat rodeo is in our rear view. Go Dawgs.
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Richt tires of pushing against Adams, his AD puppets and the athletic board.
Wife gets cancer … thankfully survives.
Paul Oliver takes his own life.
Richt reassesses priorities.
Georgia falls behind in the facilities arms race.
Gurley gets suspended in the middle of a potential championship run.
Richt and Bobo miss on multiple QB prospects.
Bobo takes Colorado State job.
Pruitt steps into vacuum and has no idea what to do.
Richt & Schottenheimer recruit Virginia cast-off QB
Team falls apart as Richt’s leadership style leads to dysfunction.
Team celebrates beating GSU as if they won the Super Bowl.
Jimmy Sexton convinces boosters Kirby is heading to Columbia
Wealthy boosters push McGarity to get Richt out and Kirby in.
Is that really the story?
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Seems as good of a recap as any.
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ACCURATE!
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Willie Martinez as defensive coordinator almost killed me. I couldn’t take it anymore and Richt wouldn’t even consider firing him.
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Until he did?
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How many seasons too late? And what about the Hocke hire?
Richt’s HR was a joke.
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My dad said Martinez should have been fired after the Sugar Bowl in 2005 … I have to say I agree with him. A month to prepare for an option-based offense and we got that disaster.
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It sounds like Michael Scott handled Stanley asking “Did I stutter?” better than Richt dealt with Pruitt.
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I am interested in tomorrow’s read. As bad as the article is to read, I go back to root cause analysis. Did Pruitt cause a lot of the problems? Yep. Did Richt do enough not to contain him… probably. I think though the disaster of Schotty was the root cause. I remember all the negativity from the fan base and the media basically saying that Richt was not long for the job had an impact on trying to fill the OC position. I think Richt chose Schotty as the best of really bad options. (I think the Richt as a hot seat coach really took off when Kirby thought about coming to be our DC but Saban talked him out of it).
As to why Richt didn’t handle things particularly well comes down to a few issues. The first is I believe early on that Richt thought Pruitt a better coordinator than Schotty (belief is not fact). I believe at some point before the season, Richt was thinking he just needed to get through the year, fire Schotty, and work on rebuilding the offensive staff. I believe if he thought that Pruitt was a flight risk as a DC and didn’t want to make waves and be forced to basically overhaul the entire staff (because that always turns out well).
I applaud Richt for making the best of his situation — I don’t applaud the rather disappointing way he approached succession planning. Bowden’s teams started falling apart after Richt left and Mullen leaving UF caused Meyer to have heart problems are good examples of poor succession planning.
The bottom line to all this is we can all look back and see the impending disaster. Who knows what was going through people’s minds during the event.
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From what I heard, your root is not accurate. When the player said Pruitt was running things, he was. Richt didn’t attend many team meetings and when he did Pruitt led them. People would look at him after Pruitt gave direction and he would say, “What he said. ”
By the way, I am not quoting a source.
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Richt needs to take Christopher Walken’s leadership course.
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One screwed up season for sure, hoping Vols, Gators go through several like that.
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The jaw-dropping anecdote for me was Schotty flipping the offense to his own play book before spring practice because he couldn’t be bothered to learn Bobo’s. Even if we never know the complete story on that or the reasons for it, simply the fact that people within the program were left with that impression is damning.
I mean, someone losing it and cussing is inexcusable – but at least it’s just a flash and reparable if both parties want it fixed. It happens. For me, the Schotty anecdote was far more damning. If Schotty had a vision worth redesigning the offense over – and it looked solid until Bama came to town – then it should have been communicated all the way through the organization.
The Pruitt thing invites a “clash of wills” and “force of personality” frame, with Richt being “too soft” – but I think it just comes down to simple communication skills. Richt obviously had issues connecting with the people immediately above him, and he obviously had issues with the people immediately below him. And it’s not just confusion within the system. What happens when players stop trusting the guy next to them to do their job? They start to overcompensate to take up the slack, and the execution errors escalate. Same thing happens in management.
Pruitt’s behavior as described was inexcusable, no question. But dang. I am trying to imagine Saban or Meyer hiring a guy to build off the foundation of a previous coordinator, then having the guy show up and say, “Nah, on second thought, let’s blow it all up.”
Then again, this is why it helps to have an army of “analysts” on staff. Lots of leverage.
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I’m equal parts fascinated and horrified reading this, mostly because it’s forcing us to relive the daily misery machine that was the 2015 season. I’m still firmly in the camp that Schottenheimer contributed to Richt’s downfall more than Pruitt. Crazy enough I read Pruitt had a hand in his hire. Anyone else here this?
These deets make me feel bad for DGDs like Sony and Nick. It’s a goddamn miracle they stayed a fourth year. Credit to Kirby for convincing them to buy in even after a mediocre 2016 season.
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I played for a coach in college baseball and had a supervisor at my career job, that were exceedingly nice guys. My cousin played for and coached under a coach that won 305 college games. The coach was a very nice person. They did not yell, curse, holler, or generally act like fools. And they treated people with respect. However, and I add a big however, I knew the boundaries and my cousin knew them. You just knew it when you met them and dealt with them-attitude or what ever you call it. I use the term benevolent dictatorship for these men. You just knew the limits and acted accordingly. Did I see people push the limit-yes-did I see these folks hit the highway-yes. I tried like hell to emulate them and not the screamers that I dealt with as supervisors or coaches.
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It’s obvious that Mark Richt had lost control of things in Athens.
Seriously though, “The chaos that was Georgia’s 2015 season was reverberating all the way to the Pacific Northwest.” This ought to give some sort of support for The Montana Project.
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Part 2 of the series has dropped at DawgPost. It’s behind a paywall other than the teaser which is that Shoddy was going to put in his offense as opposed to what he inherited from Bobo a few days before spring practice. If that’s the case (and I have no reason to believe it isn’t), CMR should have said either you will learn our offense or you’re out. Of course, no way the AD allows that to happen to pay a buyout clause from the reserve fund before the guy even coached a practice.
Dysfunction may be considered a compliment to describe 2015.
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Part 2 is up now.
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Oh but it’s behind a paywall…damn.
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Part 2 is up. Schotty gets destroyed by literally every person quotes. What a disaster he turned out to be.
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Maybe Spurrier and UF really did send Shoddy to Athens to destroy the program from the inside out. #blackhelicopters
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Yeah, Schotty’s brand of awful seems like it would require actual effort to be that bad.
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After reading parts 1 & 2, this seems to reflect worse on Richt than it does on Pruitt. Maybe the next part will change my opinion on that. And I’m not saying that Pruitt is without fault here either, but the first part tells a story of how Pruitt tried to enforce the “no fighting” rule at practice and Richt wouldn’t do it. And then Schotty decides to change the offense at the last minute and Richt doesn’t reign him in either?
I genuinely hope that Richt learned some lessons from this and shows improvement at Miami. I wouldn’t mind seeing him win a Natty, after UGA has won a couple of course.
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