Coach Mark Richt - the next chapter

After a decade of painful memories involving "he's a bulldog" Coach Goff and "he's a great recruiter" Coach Donnan, UGA decided to get a little (read, a lot) more serious and search for a head coach that had raw talent & potential, and a chance to grow over time.  A hire that could be in place working more than just a few years in the "mercenary world" of the modern football era; someone that could give a decade or more of service.  A fascinating aspect about college football, and many of college sports is that it takes years of putting things into place to make runs.    This seems to go against the flood of fans that want instant results instead of a long term program.   Ultimately, as much as we may want a national championship, what you want is a team that can make runs.  We could argue endlessly about the percentage of luck involved, but no matter how you cut it, you need a solid, well rounded, well coached team and then a chunk of luck.   There is no control over a starting playmaker getting hurt, an odd recruiting year where you get stars but not the lineman you need (a perpetual UGA problem in my opinion) or a year where everything goes right but you lose to that one team in Jacksonville that screws it all up.  

It's hard to be in the SEC East.   It's hard to win a national championship.   However, my alma mater should be able to make consistent runs with what we have.   It seems we are back on track for that once again.

CMR came in the door in 2001 and motivated us all with a great first season going 8-4 and gave Larry Munson an opportunity to utter another enduring line "We just stepped on them with a hob nailed boot" which ushered in a decade of a lot, let's face it, a lot, of wins.  Following that we were damn hard on him to start - giving not one bit of slack over the time out call (oops, we were out of time outs) in the Auburn game that year.  But CMR did something special:  he didn't place blame, he didn't cry, he sucked it up in the face of some really unfair treatment, and instead went 13-1 with an SEC championship and a Sugar Bowl victory the following year.    After 2006, another down year, he rebounded yet again in 2007, going 11-2 and beating the absolute tar out of Hawaii in the Sugar bowl, finishing AP # 2. 

That's the kind of man he is.  Sports are a wave of successes and failures.  One measure of the man, the team, and the program is the response to those failures.   After a highly disappointing 2008 and a very lack luster 2009, Coach Richt is at it again, quietly, professionally removing 3 defensive coaches, one of whom is a good friend, and beginning a now much more powerful national search amongst the top coaches in the nation to find our next defensive staff.  Again, the pundits and naysayers can't wait a day to start suggesting he was failing, our program wasn't worthy, everyone else had their coaches in place but Georgia.  So what is Coach Richt's response?  He hires one of the finest defensive coaches in the nation.  Then he backed that up 3 days later with hiring a stellar secondary coach.  Because in the dog eat dog world of college football, particularly in the SEC, that's how you achieve more of those waves of success, by riding out the storm with grace and determination, sticking to your guns, accepting responsibility, and rising to the task once again.

To begin this new decade and new chapter of the Mark Richt era of UGA football, the future looks bright once again.  If he stays on track, you can expect a lot of wild fun, emotional victories, and a really good chance at a trip to Atlanta.   In the end, one lackluster year is easily worth the next three years Coach Richt is going to put in place for more runs at the East, the SEC, and a National Championship.  And perhaps, this round, lady luck might just shine our way.

GO DAWGS!