Georgia Football: Enough with the Mark Richt Hot-Seat Talk
From the moment quarterback Greyson Lambert's desperation heave to Malcolm Mitchell hit the turf as the clock ran dry on Saturday afternoon in Knoxville in the 38-31 loss to Tennessee, you knew what was coming.
After all, Georgia had just blown a 21-point second-quarter lead—the largest blown lead in head coach Mark Richt's 15 years as its head coach—dropped its second straight conference game and played itself out of contention for the College Football Playoff.
Richt said, according to Georgia's official site:
"The reality is if you don’t win, it’s not fun. Sometimes if you do win, it’s not that fun. We do a poor job of celebrating victories no matter how they happen. It’s sickening to everybody. The coaching staff spends 80 hours a week grinding, everybody is, not just us. Our players putting the hours they put in, plus school, academics and all that kind of thing. It’s a big sacrifice from January until today. So it hurts; it’s painful, but that’s sports, that’s football and that’s part of life.
"
Unfortunately for Richt, part of life is also the inevitable "Mark Richt is on the hot seat" talking point that pops up every time Georgia drops a football game.
Don't believe me? Just search "fire Mark Richt" on Twitter, and you'll get lost in a sea of Internet angst and animosity. Just last week, Chadd Scott of GridIronNow.com made the case against Mark Richt following the blowout home loss to Alabama.
This is pretty simple: Richt is not and will not be on the hot seat in 2015.
I get it, Saturday's performance is frustrating. You're angry, and you should be.
But part of that anger stems from unrealistic expectations.
The assembled members of the media at media days in July tabbed Georgia as the favorite to win the SEC East, followed by Tennessee and two-time defending East champ Missouri. But it wasn't by a very wide margin.
That should have been the final hint of an offseason of hints that this Georgia team is not all that it was being cracked up to be.
Georgia downgraded at quarterback from redshirt senior veteran Hutson Mason to graduate transfer and Virginia backup Lambert, downgraded when Chris Conley and Michael Bennett exhausted their eligibility, downgraded immensely from former offensive coordinator Mike Bobo to Brian Schottenheimer, downgraded at middle linebacker thanks to the losses of Amarlo Herrera and Ramik Wilson and downgraded along a totally rebuilt defensive line.
Georgia seemed like the default pick to win the division due in part to the questions surrounding the other teams in the division, but similar questions existed in Richt's own program.
That's OK. Like Florida and Tennessee, Georgia recruits its tail off every single year. Sometimes, though, there are years when there is too much turnover.
This is one of those years for Georgia.
Does Georgia underachieve? It depends on what the expectations are. The perception of Richt, though, is more influenced by bad luck than anything else.
In 2012, he had the second-best team in the nation. The Bulldogs were five yards away from an SEC Championship Game win over Alabama, and had it not been for one tipped pass that fell in the lap of Conley, Georgia would have at least earned one last play against Alabama to win the title and advance to play an overmatched Notre Dame team in the BCS Championship Game.
Think about that for one second. It's not just that linebacker C.J. Mosley made a great play tipping Aaron Murray's pass, it's that it deflected to the worst possible spot on the field. One foot one way or the other, and not only does the perception of Richt change but the perception of the entire program does as well.
In the quirky 2007 season, Richt had his team playing perhaps the best football in the country at season's end, but the Bulldogs got jumped by eventual national champ LSU—which beat Tennessee in the SEC Championship Game—on the final week of the season. In 2002, Georgia was stuck with one loss behind Miami and Ohio State—both of which ran the regular-season table.
In his best years, Richt didn't get the luck that Alabama head coach Nick Saban got in 2011 and 2012 when his teams lost games in November. Simply put, the dominoes didn't fall in Richt's favor, and that's the biggest reason why the perception that he's underwhelming as a head coach exists today.
He has a .737 career winning percentage (140-50), has two SEC titles to his credit, has won the SEC East five times and has been in the discussion for the division title in November in each of the last four seasons.
Besides, Richt just got a raise to $4 million per year, convinced athletic director Greg McGarity to up the budget for assistants that nearly doubled the salary Schottenheimer got compared to his predecessor and finally got the ball rolling on an indoor practice facility in Athens.
All of those things aren't indicators that Georgia is ahead of the curve; rather, they merely brought the program up to the rest of the pack in the SEC's facilities-and-salary arms race.
Simply put, Richt has kept Georgia as a perennial contender on the field and forced the administration to keep pace off it.
If Georgia played the coaching carousel, could the new guy (or guys) have the same kind of success? Not likely.
It's really hard to win national championships, and Richt proves that.
He isn't going anywhere.
It shouldn't even be a consideration.
Quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted. Recruiting information is courtesy of 247Sports. Statistics are courtesy of CFBStats.com.
Barrett Sallee is the lead SEC college football writer and national college football video analyst for Bleacher Report as well as a host on Bleacher Report Radio on SiriusXM 83. Follow Barrett on Twitter @BarrettSallee.
.jpg?w=600 "NFL Not Investigating Mike Vrabel")
.jpg?w=600 "Jeremiyah Love on Giants' Radar")
