I said it before, and I'll say it again

It’s not just Willie. Whatever happened to “Finish the Drill”? Has any other coaching staff done so little with so much this season? Something in our team’s culture needs to change, and it needs to change with the coaching staff. CMR was man enough to realize he needed to give up the OC position in 06; he was intelligent enough to realize he needed to energize his team in 07. The defining moment of the Richt era is going to be whether he’s man enough to figure out exactly what’s wrong with this coaching staff (that is, besides the obvious: WM, horrible special teams strategy/coaching, and a pathetically lax attitude toward team discipline, on and off the field) and then doing what needs to be done to fix it.

I don’t know how CMR voted this year, but maybe he needs to take a page from our President-Elect. This program needs some Change, and it’s only going to come from one place — the top.

I take issue with the claim that Mark Richt has had a lax attitude towards discipline, either on or off the field.

The players have been running stadium steps after incurring personal foul penalties (of which, incidentally, I believe there were none today) and Coach Richt has imposed meaningful discipline within 48 hours of a player arrest in every single instance in the last eight years. He has kicked players off of the team, from Jasper Sanks to Michael Lemon, and he has stiffened suspensions (during meaningful games, mind you) upon learning of a failure to cooperate with the authorities.

These are 18-to-22-year-old young men in Athens, Ga., and they fall prey to many of the foolish temptations that most of us did when we were 18-to-22-year-old young men in Athens, Ga. Coach Richt requires mandatory character education classes for his players and enforces the strictest anti-alcohol policy in the S.E.C. There’s not much more he could do on that front.

The rest of both of your points, though, are very solid and real changes need to be made this year, as they were in 2006 and 2007.

Whoa, there, IRSDawg. I agree with your vitriol towards the bald wonder, and I understand that you’re as upset and angry as we all are after that 2nd Half defensive embarrassment.

However, I take issue with anyone who implies that CMR should be on any type of “hot seat.” Coach Richt has taken our program from a place where 10 wins would be considered a great season to a place where it could legitimately be considered disappointing, or even a failure. On top of that, he has effected this turnaround while maintaining a program with first-class character, class, and sportsmanship.

Say many things about other coaches… make legimate criticism about CMR’s decisions… but I would have to see many, many changes in the program both on an off the field before I would even start hinting that the fact that CMR’s job would be in danger.

. . . That give me pause. According to the ABH (HT Blutarsky ) CMR said this at one point after the game:

"I think we had 18 season-ending injuries, last year we had one," Richt said. "We played the toughest schedule according to the NCAA…"

True, yes. But there’s a fine line between offering explanations and giving excuses. If that’s an explanation, fine, but from what (admittedly, little) I’ve heard from the coaching staff this year, this sounds more like a defensive excuse. Making excuses doesn’t win national championships.

Since there’s already enough threads going I didn’t want to assume that this warranted its own, so I’ll just post it here. I’m certainly not an analyst on the level of Dr. Saturday, so this is probably meaningless. But:

Over the course of the season this team has:
Won six games by double digit margins
Won three games by single digit margins
Lost three games

In the first group, games we won by double digits (GSU, CMU, ASU, UT, Vandy, LSU), we never trailed the other team.

In the three games we won by single digits (USc, UK, AU) we trailed the opposing team at some point during the game (by 4 against USc, by 3 at various points in the second half against UK, and by 6 after AU’s initial touchdown).

In the third group, games we lost (Bama, UF, GT) we we trailed by double digits peaking at: 31, 46 and 12 (respectively) and allowed unanswered scoring runs of 31, 42 and 26 (respectively).

Finally I have a pseudo-stat to pair with what I have perceived as the most disturbing trend in our team this year: an inability to come back from behind. As I pointed out above, the largest deficit our team has overcome for a victory was 6 points against a 5-7 team.

Were our players and coaching staff so assured of our obvious superiority to any other team that could take the field, as acclaimed by the press and the media, that the only response they could muster to the least sign of life displayed by an opponent was to roll over in utter shock that any team could dare to challenge their obvious invincibility? That’s what it looked like to me during the first half against Bama, the third quarter against Tech and the entire game against Florida.

Yes, we came back in the second half against Bama, and to a lesser extent against Tech in the 4th quarter. But in both cases it was already too late. In the three instances that our team fell behind by double digits, they seemed dazed, shocked and confused. It’s one thing to expect to win a game; it’s another thing to be so full of yourself that when another team challenges you, instead of rising to the occasion you simply quit because you can’t believe another team has the audacity to challenge you.

That may be an unfair characterization, but that’s my visceral reaction to our three losses this year. And as far as I can tell, the coaches have done little to dispel this attitude, maybe even soaking it up some themselves (see quote in above post). Apparently the pre-season hype was too much for this team, and too much for the coaches. A #1 ranking wasn’t too much for USC in 2004 and or USC 05 and tOSU 06 (in terms of making the title game). Why should it have been too much for UGA 08, except for coaching?