Great question in Seth’s Mailbag today ($$):
Who is the most maligned former Georgia assistant coach? Brian Schottenheimer or Todd Grantham? We will also accept Willie Martinez.
If that isn’t a lead in for a GTP reader poll, I don’t know what is.
As you can see, I’ve added a couple more names. (Age’ll do that to a guy.) Kevin Ramsey, in particular, is a name older Dawg fans scare their kids with when they don’t follow direction.
If you pick “Other”, give us a name, of course.
Have fun!
Get The Picture 
Voted for Two Thumbs, but I had an even scarier name than Kevin Ramsey … Richard Bell.
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Bell wasn’t the best of choices, but he did have some experience. (I thought about adding Marion Campbell to the list, but I’m not that cruel.)
On a scary scale, it’s hard to top demoting a coordinator mid-game because of total ineptitude.
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Good point. Through the 90s, we had some great choices for defensive coordinator.
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Kevin Ramsey, only because I was at that infamous game.
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If it doesn’t cause too many problems, could you tell me what you mean? I remember the name, but I don’t remember the details around Ramsey.
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Honestly, all I remember is us playing tight man on the corners and they kept going long and scoring touchdowns. No adjustments. Like NO adjustments. They just kept doing it and scoring. I’m sure people have a better, more detailed analysis, but I try to block out those games from memory.
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Was it Auburn in ’99?
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yessssirrrr
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Yup.
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I forgot about the experience with the Swamp Fox
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Willie Martinez. Hands down.
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Cool Breeze was the worst. WM was no prize, but Ramsey? Turrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrible.
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Agreed and FAIRLY maligned. Ran VanGorder’s D into the ground in his 1st year: losses to Aub and WVa squarely on the D at a time when O was cooking.
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You mean two thumbs up.
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I went with WM based simply on his longevity. Ramsey was basically one and done like Schotty.
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While I don’t think it was deserved, I would have to put Bobo in there as an “other”. His box of crayons never got the credit it deserved.
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No Bobo on the list. I believe that marks the end of an era.
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Poll is for former coaches. Bobo was maligned while he was in Athens. 😉
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So were the rest of them, those that I remember anyhow.
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Willie. All day. Every day. Dick Rod’s West Virginia team had one play their playbook and for some reason Willie didn’t expect them to run it. Willie made NFL-caliber defensive backs look pedestrian game after game. 4th and Willie was way more frustrating than 3rd and Grantham.
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I gave serious consideration to voting Jim Chaney, but instead I voted “other.” I’ve always thought that the term “malign” carried with it the sense of being slightly unfair in one’s criticisms, and I confirmed that before voting with the Merriam Webster defintion of the verb “malign”: “to utter injuriously misleading or false reports about.”
Of your candidates, only Chaney gets criticism that I feel is unfair. On balance, he did a good job with our offense, with some obvious caveats about the red zone and the lack of second-half adjustments in some games against Alabama of which I haven’t quite managed to drink away the memory. The rest of those choices? They deserve all the bad press they get. Particularly Kevin Ramsey. Holy cow, I’d blocked him out of my memory, but if you want to talk about the behind-the-scenes rumors about Pruitt and Schottenheimer, et al bumping heads then gather ’round, little children, and let’s swap stories of Kevin Ramsey getting punched in the face at halftime of a game (allegedly).
No, I think the most unfairly maligned coordinator by our fans continues to be Coach Bobo. He managed to get some of his due there in the second half of his tenure as OC as the offense kept improving, but there are still people who jeer him. Personally, I wish him very well at Colorado State but I also privately hope if things don’t end up working out for him that he’d find his way back home to work with Kirby.
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Good post
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I agree. If we are talking about the former coach who was most insanely criticized by fans, I think Bobo wins that contest by a mile.
If we are talking about former coaches who still give me nightmares, my personal list is Schotty, Two Thumbs, and Ramsey in pretty much any order.
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I agree about Bobo. I think his first two years of learning on the job unfairly tainted him (with some fans) for the rest of his tenure. Early on, I was as frustrated as anyone with his seemingly random play calling in the name of maintaining balance. Later on, I definitely appreciated his production.
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Those first 2 years might have been bad because of Richt “helping” Bobo.
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I voted for Martinez because I still hear his name invoked the most. But I’d have to say Schottenheimer was much worse given how quickly he destroyed what he inherited (although lack of a QB helped speed that along).
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Schotty may have been UF’s revenge for us sending them Boom. We just wised up faster than they did.
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John Fabris made it into the Lexicon. That’s my guy.
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So did Third….I think he did.
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To be honest, I was referring to “Third and Grantham”..but when I checked in the Lexicon, there was “Third and Willie”. So “Third” would be an un-matchable contestant for most maligned…as it consummates both legends.
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I will defer to your irrefutable logic.
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Kevin Ramsey was terrible, but recency bias led me to vote for (or, rather, against) Schitty. A perplexing hire that soon became much worse than perplexing. And he was essentially demoted mid-season, no? Didn’t Richt take over playcalling duties after the debacle in Jacksonville?
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Gotta go with ramsey because he really, really deserved it.
That auburn game when we had the opportunity to clinch our first east title after beating the gators was pathetic. Giving up almost 400 to Ben fucking Leard? Kevin’s the leader and it’s not close.
Willie is a distant second. The rest get a bad rap in my opinion.
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Ramsey was the defensive coordinator for only one season, 1999. You’re thinking about when we choked against Auburn in 1997 after beating Florida. Gators stomped us in ’99.
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As “Go Dawgs!” said, you’re conflating the 1997 and 1999 seasons, but as a side note, we likely would not have won the East in 1997 even if we had beaten Auburn. In that case, and all other results as played, UGA and Tennessee would have both had one SEC loss, with Tennessee holding the head-to-head tiebreaker in 1997.
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Willie Martinez hands down.
The 2008 season we gave up:
41 to Bama
38 to LSU
49 to Florida
38 to Kentucky
45 to Tech
The 2009 season we gave up:
37 to South Carolina
41 to Arkansas
45 to Tennessee
41 to Florida
34 to Kentucky
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that Arkansas game. Willie said something about how they were “throwing hand grenades” and all I could think was “WELL F-ING STOP THEM”
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I knew Willie was in trouble when his favorite time of the year was running around likel a madman teaching those bunch of fat housewives about football in that class Richt held in the summer. I will never forget him giving one of the ladies a forearm shiver and knocking her on her butt. Good thing she had lots of padding or it would have probably killed her
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You make a very strong case that he was a terrible DC..but is he the most maligned? Grantham’s and Schotty’s legends are fresher so they may get more votes than they should.
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I don’t know, watching 5 Star Reshad Jones whiff countless times on Tech running backs as they hung 45 on us and then turn into one of the best safeties in the NFL was pretty awful. Willie’s plenty maligned.
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Impressive, but take a look at Grantham’s numbers. At one point they were even worse on a ppg basis than WM, not sure if it ended that way.
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My PTSD from the ’99 Auburn game remains acute enough that I was tempted to pick Ramsey, but I did not, on the grounds that he was never a Georgia assistant coach. He was a Tennessee plant sent down by Fulmer to destroy the UGA program from the inside. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
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I was a student at the game, sitting close to front row. Managed to sneak in a whole plastic liter bottle of Beam, which me and my friends passed around. We didn’t leave early despite the debacle. Late in the 4th, the stands were almost empty, and the only people near us was a couple, 25 feet away and two rows back, quietly minding their business and enjoying the romance of the stadium together, despite the score.
Well the bottle was empty and Auburn probably scored again towards the end, and I absentmindely flung the bottle without looking (kinda sidearm behind me, like where you lift up your left arm and whiz it past your side). Of course, it took off. Much to my horror, I watched it spin horizontally like Maverick’s plane when it went down, and as it slowly soared, I feared the worst. Of course, it popped the girl in the head. I couldn’t have made that throw once in 20 if I tried.
The dude, rightfully so, was pissed. I apologized profusely, and swore up and down I didn’t mean to (I didn’t!). He didn’t believe me (why would he?) but we had a group of like 8 and he was alone so I was safe. Thankfully the bottle was plastic and she lived.
So yeah, Kevin Ramsey made me (unintentionally) throw a bottle at a woman.
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THAT WAS YOU??!!??!!?
Just kidding. I graduated before that and always insisted my seats be on the South side to avoid just such a scenario.
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Yyyyikes. I drove all the way down from Lynchburg, Virginia, for that game after having crowed to my co-workers all week long about how we were going to stomp a mudhole in Auburn’s ass, but you’ve got me beat.
Sounds like a better pass than anything Quincy threw that game, though. If it helps.
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was quincy even at that game?
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I am surprised Todd isn’t polling “better.” He and Brian should benefit from recency bias the most, and Todd aggravated for longer. Plus he coaches for the Gators now. And while Brian captained the offense that got Richt fired, Todd mismanaged a defense for a team that could have taken home a national championship. Bama averaged 7.11 yards per play on 72 plays in that 2012 game. 512 yards. 350 yards rushing at 6.9 a clip. The only team to surrender more yards rushing and yards per carry to Alabama that year was a 5-7 Missouri team.
VOTE FOR TODD!
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Todd got my vote for this exact reasoning. We had a couple of pretty great offenses, as you mentioned, capable of going the distance. But for his coaching, or lack thereof, we might have a trophy in the case. Todd managed to live up to his moniker at UGA, Louisville, and UF (thankfully). In addition to the results on the scoreboard, you could see the results of poor coaching on the field. The number of plays where our team wasn’t set and/or were running around with their arms flailing in the air, was mind boggling.
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I would also argue that if Jarvis Jones wasn’t on those defenses, saving his arse time and time again, we’d have a much worse image in our mind of 3aG. (and the image in mine is already pretty bad)
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yep …woulda been a lot worse save for JJ and Big Tree
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I actually believe Grantham has a pretty great defensive mind. He just has no clue how to implement what he wants onto the field. The players constant checking with one another and confusion as to where to line up, the looking over at the sidelines waaaaaay to long until it’s too late and the ball is snapped, the general fire drill feel and lack of discipline, etc. As laymen we all complain that what he was doing was too complicated but there’s more to it than that. Jarvis Jones sure did make Grantham look like a hero in his first year, especially after coming off of the shell shock of the Willie defenses.
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Off topic, but we are going to discuss Freeze giving an offer to a QB named General Booty, right?
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The man is certainly experienced at Booty calls.
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Saw that, but I got my Freeze snark in yesterday.
Don’t let that stop you, though. 🙂
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General Booty kind of describes my success rate as a student in Athens. Major Booty would have been a stretch.
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Man I lol’d so hard at that. Thank you.
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Tough choices. Even though I’ve been a Dawg fan for over 50 years, I never really paid attention to the assistant coaches (other than Erk, of course) until Richt got here. So, thankfully, I don’t have any real memories specifically of Ramsey, just that our defense sucked.
With that, I narrowed it down to Schitty and Willie Two Thumbs. Willie started the decline of Richt and absolutely wasted some great offenses from Bobo. Schitty burned bright but fast. He went from an absolute high of hanging half a hundred on the ol’ Ball Sack (and putting Greyson Lambert’s name in the NCAA record book), to being unable to score a TD against a bad Missouri team at home. That’s a supernova of suckage, so I had to vote for him.
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Agreed I’d vote for Schott then Willie. Grantham is a distant 3rd.
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I am about your generation, and like you I am not aware of any disasters on Dooley’s staff except Jim Pyburn coaching DBs. I do not recall if it was Chris Welton or Scott Woerner who said that he never got any coaching about technique from Pyburn. Hi only instruction was “go knock the other guy on his ass.” Pyburn quit after the 1979 season in part because he was angry about his son Jeff not being the starting QB. Whomever it was who commented on the lack of coaching said how refreshing it was when Bill Lewis took Pyburn’s place and actually coached them.
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Schotty hands down for me. His reign of terror was short but horrific.
Martinez was God awful as a DC, but I still have to give him credit for his time as a position coach where I think he did a very good job.
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Schotty is definitely the worst. He got Mark Richt fired! Getting a beloved head coach and your boss fired, as well as publicly humiliated, has got to be THE top career achievement for lousy assistants.
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Eh, at the end of the day, Richt got himself fired. Willie, 3andG, and BS were ALL his undoing. Blaming Schott for Richt’s demise is to forget ALLLL the things Richt ‘lost control of’ during his tenure.
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Grantham was actually pretty good in 2011 and 2012, but he refused to alter his scheme once everyone went to the NFL, hence “linebackers looking baffled at the sideline signals four seconds after the other team snapped the ball.” As seen in Florida this season, when his one trick – blitz blitz blitz – works, it really works. When it doesn’t, Jake Fromm drops third down dimes all over you.
Chaney, Williemart, shoot even Ramsey have had success at some points in their careers.
Schitty has NEVER been good as a football coordinator or coach or waterboy or anything related to the sport at any level, anywhere. He’s the winner.
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Judging by whom I have shouted at the most during UGA games, Bobo is the clear winner.
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For me Kevin Ramsay hands down. if memory serves me correct he was replaced at halftime during the worst first half defensive performance I`ve
ever endured between the hedges by former DC Joe Kines.
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Kevin Ramsey was far worse than Schotty. He was so bad that he had to be stripped of his duties at halftime after giving up 31 points in the first half at home to AU. He then followed this up by punching Donnan as he was heading out the door.
Where is Ramsey today? Hes the HC at Clark Atlanta after some years as DC at Alabama State. Schotty, meanwhile, is an OC in the NFL.
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I’m so disappointed in you 😉
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The answer is Soft Willie, and it’s not even close. He’s the guy who cost us the 2007 National Title when his defense couldn’t stop a terrible Carolina team from running the ball in the fourth quarter at home. His soft zone defense allowed the immortal Erik Ainge to pick us apart in a blowout in Hillbillyville. Then, in the 2008 season, well… David K already posted all of the 30 and 40+ games his defenses gave up then.
He was promoted to DC because Richt was too much of a puss to stand up to B-M and force them to pay Broyle’s Award winner BVG what he was worth, or, maybe because Richt actually wanted him gone so he could then promote his former college roommate, best friend, best man to a job that was too big for him,
And then, because of his personal relationship, he didn’t fire Soft Willie after the 2008 season when he should’ve been fired, instead keeping him around for 2 more excruciating years. For that alone, Richt should’ve been fired after 2010 along with Martinez, but that’s another story.
How many great players on those defenses between 2005-2010 went out to have great NFL careers but underachieved at UGA thanks to Soft Willie? Schottheheimer sucks, but he was here a year. Grantham became a target AFTER he left for taking shots at Georgia, and for the terrible 2013 season. But no one wants to admit the 2011 and 2012 defenses were great (except vs. Bama, but that’s also Bama).
The answer is Soft Willie.
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Bobo cost UGA in ’07 he apologized for sticking with the run against UT, and the play action where Stafford was sacked against USCe. UGA was 3 of 18 on 3rd down against USCe, Willie held USCe to 1 of 11 on 3rd down. Martinez was not a great coach but ’07 belongs to Bobo.
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Based on the definition thoughtfully provided by Go Dawgs above, I voted “Other.” I think that Bobo was most maligned (“to utter injuriously misleading or false reports about”) of the bunch. He was a good OC and, unlike the others named, he improved over time. The others were not “maligned” they were fairly disparaged for abysmal performances.
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Which assistant was it that Donnan fired, he went home and put on a suit, came back and decked Jim?
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Ah, I see my question was answered!
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Shotty wasn’t here long enough to do long term damage. However, just thinking about Willy brings back nightmares.
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That is debatable. Trevor Lawrence and Fromm committed to other schools as a result of Schott’s recruiting skills.
Martinez was not a good coach but didn’t get his head coach fired.
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I voted for Schitty. But all the posts about Willie make me wonder if I should have gone with him. He’s been gone long enough that some of team edge wore off ‘re memories. He and Schitty bring up the old question, is it better to burn out or fade away? Willie had a storied career of shitty coaching at UG A and while Schitty was only there for one season, thank God, he arguably packed more horrible coaching into that one year and was spent.
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I also was at the Auburn 1999 game. That one game was enough to get Kevin Ramsey my vote.
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My god it was Martinez. He was a horrible experience. I watched his defense play with one eye closed and my head curled to the side. I’m still angry about it all these years later. Willies D would give up 15 yards, 20 yards, 10 yards, 20 yards. And then it was “ can we stop them in the red zone.” It was a horror show.
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Did anyone notice on the video there were stats from Tom Brady on the bottom of the screen? LOL
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And who hired all these incompetent bastards? None other then the UGA’s fan bases’ favorite coach of all time: Mark Richt!
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It’s Kevin Ramsey, hands down. It is hard to describe just how out of his element he was.
He was completely unqualified for the job, was hired only for recruiting (which he bombed at), and by all accounts legit had a nervous breakdown in the middle of a game to the point that he allegedly couldn’t even call plays.
Ramsey was an unmitigated disaster.
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