Look, I love Mark Richt as a person. I will never forget his role in the Southern Baptist film "Facing The Giants" for instance. (And people looking for more quality evangelical Christian entertainment along that vein should also check out "The Time Changer", "God's Not Dead", "Do You Believe", "War Room", "God's Outlaw" and "Flywheel.") But for people who want to play that card ... Richt was making $4 million a year and also had among the highest paid group of assistants in the country. He demanded that UGA invest tens of millions in new facilities while the state was dealing with a severe recession, cuts to higher education that saw several whole colleges eliminated (including SPSU - the state's best undergrad STEM school - and GPC the state's largest and best junior college) and while UGA was chasing every penny that they could to build a credible engineering school and start a medical program so they could challenge AAU members Missouri and Florida (as well as Auburn) in research. And oh yes, graduation rates were terrible under Richt and so were off-the-field problems. So the folks who were using the "Richt is a great man who brings much-needed integrity to the sport" justification for holding onto the guy were purposefully avoiding the entire picture. Richt is as much of an SEC guy (and before that a Florida State guy ... and if you believe that the issues with FSU began and ended with Jimbo Fisher and Jameis Winston you are nuts ... FSU was practically notorious in the 1990s when Richt was on that staff) as anyone else.
Second, the idea that ethics hamstrung UGA under Richt is also pretty much false, and mostly sour grapes. The truth is that more than a few coaches that have had more success than Richt run programs that are as clean - or are even cleaner - than Richt's UGA, and UGA fans have spent the last few years especially overhyping issues at every other successful program while ignoring the long line of arrests and suspensions in Athens. Case in point: the one time Bob Stoops got in trouble with the NCAA in Oklahoma was over an issue that they reported themselves. (When the NCAA tried to hammer OU over it, Stoops appealed AND WON.) Steve Spurrier actually cleaned up two programs that were in significant NCAA trouble at the time (Florida and South Carolina) AND helped expose the cheating that Mike DuBose was doing at Alabama. The next time that Dabo Swinney, David Shaw, Mark Dantonio or Jim Harbaugh gets accused of anything untoward will be the first. And make an issue of Nick Saban's roster management tactics all you want ... it is entirely within NCAA rules and even more important Saban is 100% upfront about it during recruiting which is why not one kid who has gotten his scholarship pulled by Saban has ever groused about it.
Finally, the Mark Richt regime at UGA has two eras. Everyone likes to look at it as "before 2008/after 2008" and claim that the notorious home loss to Saban and Alabama was the event that UGA went from being a contending, up-and-coming program to going into a downward spiral that Richt never recovered from. Sorry, that is false. This is more accurate: with Donnan's players (including Richt's initial recruiting classes that Donnan had in the pipeline that Richt retained) and without them.
When Richt was playing Donnan's recruits, UGA averaged 11 wins a season and won 2 SEC titles. Since D.J. Shockley and the last batch of Donnan guys left in 2005, UGA has averaged 4 losses a season, actually had a losing record against South Carolina until 2014, and won the SEC East as many times as Missouri (and even that was due to South Carolina having a much tougher SEC draw in 2011 and 2012). A major reason: QB play has been very inconsistent since the guys that Donnan recruited to play the position left Athens, and Richt has been hilariously passing up in-state 4 and 5 star guys like Cam Newton, Connor Shaw, Blake Sims, Josh Dobbs and DeShaun Watson for the likes of Brice Ramsey, Jacob Park, Faton Bauta, Logan Gray, reality TV star Hutson Mason and Christian LeMay. The typical excuse: the guys passed up were spread/dual threat guys who couldn't learn a pro style offense. Fine, except that Bauta, Gray, Mason and Aaron Murray were spread/dual threat QBs too, and Newton, Shaw, Sims and Watson all proved to be very capable passers at other schools (and in Newton's case the NFL). It wasn't the pro-style versus spread/dual threat thing but that Richt had this bizarre belief that nontraditional QBs from out of state were better than in-state products like Shaw and Watson that had similar or in some cases much higher ratings.
QB is only part of the story. For all the hype that Richt's recruiting gets, Donnan was actually better at finding players. It was Donnan who recruited future NFL Hall of Famers like Hines Ward and Champ Bailey. (Would Richt have given Ward, a 4 star guy with terrible measurables 5'9", 4.6 40, high school QB with a weak arm a scholarship?) Of course not. Donnan was also the one who recruited dominant players at both lines. Where Donnan had 4 guys on the DL that were 285 lbs. and super athletic future 1st round draft picks at the same time (Charles Grant, Richard Seymour, Marcus Stroud, Jonathan Sullivan) has a single Richt recruit at DT ever been a #1 draft pick? Hasn't been much better at DE either. David Pollack? Recruited by Donnan. Jarvis Jones? Remember ... he originally went to Southern Cal, broke his neck, and then went to UGA only because USC's doctors wouldn't medically clear him.
Offensive line is more of the same. UGA hasn't sent an OL in the first round since Donnan recruit George Foster in 2003. Keep in mind that the Stinchcombs (1st and 2nd rounders) and 1st rounder Chris Terry, 2nd rounder Adam Meadows and 3rd rounder Jonas Jennings were OTs that UGA sent to the NFL around that same era too. By contrast, the only starting NFL OT that Richt has recruited to UGA was Cordy Glenn. (I do acknowledge that John Theus will be #2). So Donnan recruited the QBs (it is nuts to think that Donnan would have tried to get Cam Newton to play TE/DE and opened the possibility of moving to WR/DB with Deshaun Watson like Richt's staff did) and the difference makers up front on both sides of the line. Richt hasn't been able to consistently do either and you see the results.
The final thing: running a program. Consider that successful coaches like the Sabans, Carrolls, Meyers, Stoops etc. have "coaching trees", guys who have gone on to head coaching jobs at other major schools. (Example: at one point nearly half the head coaches in the Big 12 were former Bob Stoops assistants.) But the next guy who goes directly from Mark Richt's staff to a head coaching job at a major school will be the first. And Richt assistants have only gotten 2 jobs at MINOR schools: Bobo at Colorado State and VanGorder at Georgia Southern (who was FCS at the time). Even Bobo comes with an asterisk: Colorado State previously had the very successful Jim McElwain and tried to replicate his tenure by hiring another long term SEC offensive coordinator. So, Saban had more to do with Bobo getting a head coaching job than Richt did.
It is more than just a largely underwhelming group of assistants. It is also that Richt has never successfully implemented a coherent system or philosophy on offense or defense. On defense UGA was basically 4-3 under BVG, 4-6 (with zone in the secondary!) under Martinez, switched to a 3-4 under Grantham, and now still play 3-4 but with an entirely different philosophy under Pruitt. But that can be forgiven: Richt is an offensive guy, right? Except that Richt spent his initial years in Athens trying and failing to implement the FSU offense while being his own coordinator, even though that offense wasn't really the best fit for David Greene or the WRs. Then he had a kinda sorta spread look with D. J. Shockley for a year. Then they went through the "pure pro style" era with Matt Stafford, followed by a couple of years of incoherency (including but not limited to a failed attempt to put in a wildcat/wild dawg package with Logan Gray and then trying to figure out what to do with Aaron Murray after Mettenberger got kicked out of school) before settling on a return to UGA power running/play action football and then scrapping that for Brian "trading on my dad's last name and accomplishments" Schottenheimer's west coast offense. It would be one thing if you could say that UGA was adapting their offense to their personnel like Mack Brown did during his most successful years at Texas going from a pro-style QB in Chris Simms and Major Applewhite to a zone-read option with Vince Young to a spread with Colt McCoy, but UGA only actually did that during the Matt Stafford era. The rest of the time, UGA was mostly trying and failing to put square pegs in round holes with Richt on offense.
Yes, Richt won games at UGA; a lot of them. But please consider:
UGA plays 3 OOC games against cupcakes and a 4th against greatly overmatched Georgia Tech (whose recruiting has fallen off the map under their current coach and particularly since 2010).
The SEC East has 4 teams (South Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri, Vanderbilt) who really don't recruit much better than Tech most years.
The other 2 traditional powers in the East are Florida and Tennessee. The Vols haven't won the SEC this century. They haven't won the SEC East since 2007, which was the last time before this season that they reached 8 wins, and their last team with fewer than 4 losses was 2004 (when they lost 3, as they did in 2002) and they lost 5 in 2002. Add it all up and Richt only played a single top 10 Tennessee team - the 2001 edition - to which Richt lost. As a matter of fact, Richt is 1-3 against the 4 Tennessee teams to win 10 games, including a 35-14 embarrassment by the 2007 team that UGA fans strangely insist should have played for the national title despite their best victories coming against a pair of 9-4 Auburn and Florida teams and also an 8-5 Kentucky team (Auburn and Kentucky at home, Florida at a neutral site).
Florida meanwhile has been feast and famine, but truthfully mostly famine (the failed Zook and Muschamp regimes, the beginning and end of the Meyer era, meaning that Florida only reached 10 wins 6 times in the Richt era). Imagine if Richt had played Spurrier and Fulmer at their peaks in the 1990s when Florida only failed to reach 10 wins thrice (when they won 9) and Tennessee was one step behind.
Then you have Georgia's other SEC foe: Auburn, who was great in 2012, 2010 and 2004, good in 2006 but has otherwise been a mess throughout the Richt era, even in the years when they exploited similarly weak scheduling (back when the Mississippi schools were terrible for instance, and Auburn doesn't even have a regular OOC rival like Tech so their 4 games are generally even weaker than UGA's) to scratch out 9 wins despite real problems scoring points under Tuberville or stopping anybody in the years since.
So add it all up ... how many wins does Richt have over teams that finished ranked in the top 10 in the final poll (not teams that were in the top 10 when UGA played them but finished up 7-6 or 8-5)? Not very many. How many wins does Richt have over teams that finished with fewer than 3 losses? Virtually none. How many wins does Richt have over teams that finished in the top 5 in the final polls, including (for example) teams that went on to win the SEC and/or play for the national title? Nada. Zip. None. This means that in 15 years, Richt has zero big wins. That is the bottom line. Richt has nothing that should be considered a "big win" by a program of UGA's caliber. In fact, the biggest win of Richt's career came in the 2005 SEC championship game against a 3 loss LSU team. That was the best, most talented team that Richt has ever beaten ... one that was riddled with injuries (much of their OL and their entire scholarship depth chart at RB out due to injury, and oh yes UGA knocked out their starting QB in the first quarter) and exhausted because of having to play 13 consecutive weeks due to Hurricane Katrina.
Final analysis: Richt is a great guy. But as a coach, UGA can and should do better.
Second, the idea that ethics hamstrung UGA under Richt is also pretty much false, and mostly sour grapes. The truth is that more than a few coaches that have had more success than Richt run programs that are as clean - or are even cleaner - than Richt's UGA, and UGA fans have spent the last few years especially overhyping issues at every other successful program while ignoring the long line of arrests and suspensions in Athens. Case in point: the one time Bob Stoops got in trouble with the NCAA in Oklahoma was over an issue that they reported themselves. (When the NCAA tried to hammer OU over it, Stoops appealed AND WON.) Steve Spurrier actually cleaned up two programs that were in significant NCAA trouble at the time (Florida and South Carolina) AND helped expose the cheating that Mike DuBose was doing at Alabama. The next time that Dabo Swinney, David Shaw, Mark Dantonio or Jim Harbaugh gets accused of anything untoward will be the first. And make an issue of Nick Saban's roster management tactics all you want ... it is entirely within NCAA rules and even more important Saban is 100% upfront about it during recruiting which is why not one kid who has gotten his scholarship pulled by Saban has ever groused about it.
Finally, the Mark Richt regime at UGA has two eras. Everyone likes to look at it as "before 2008/after 2008" and claim that the notorious home loss to Saban and Alabama was the event that UGA went from being a contending, up-and-coming program to going into a downward spiral that Richt never recovered from. Sorry, that is false. This is more accurate: with Donnan's players (including Richt's initial recruiting classes that Donnan had in the pipeline that Richt retained) and without them.
When Richt was playing Donnan's recruits, UGA averaged 11 wins a season and won 2 SEC titles. Since D.J. Shockley and the last batch of Donnan guys left in 2005, UGA has averaged 4 losses a season, actually had a losing record against South Carolina until 2014, and won the SEC East as many times as Missouri (and even that was due to South Carolina having a much tougher SEC draw in 2011 and 2012). A major reason: QB play has been very inconsistent since the guys that Donnan recruited to play the position left Athens, and Richt has been hilariously passing up in-state 4 and 5 star guys like Cam Newton, Connor Shaw, Blake Sims, Josh Dobbs and DeShaun Watson for the likes of Brice Ramsey, Jacob Park, Faton Bauta, Logan Gray, reality TV star Hutson Mason and Christian LeMay. The typical excuse: the guys passed up were spread/dual threat guys who couldn't learn a pro style offense. Fine, except that Bauta, Gray, Mason and Aaron Murray were spread/dual threat QBs too, and Newton, Shaw, Sims and Watson all proved to be very capable passers at other schools (and in Newton's case the NFL). It wasn't the pro-style versus spread/dual threat thing but that Richt had this bizarre belief that nontraditional QBs from out of state were better than in-state products like Shaw and Watson that had similar or in some cases much higher ratings.
QB is only part of the story. For all the hype that Richt's recruiting gets, Donnan was actually better at finding players. It was Donnan who recruited future NFL Hall of Famers like Hines Ward and Champ Bailey. (Would Richt have given Ward, a 4 star guy with terrible measurables 5'9", 4.6 40, high school QB with a weak arm a scholarship?) Of course not. Donnan was also the one who recruited dominant players at both lines. Where Donnan had 4 guys on the DL that were 285 lbs. and super athletic future 1st round draft picks at the same time (Charles Grant, Richard Seymour, Marcus Stroud, Jonathan Sullivan) has a single Richt recruit at DT ever been a #1 draft pick? Hasn't been much better at DE either. David Pollack? Recruited by Donnan. Jarvis Jones? Remember ... he originally went to Southern Cal, broke his neck, and then went to UGA only because USC's doctors wouldn't medically clear him.
Offensive line is more of the same. UGA hasn't sent an OL in the first round since Donnan recruit George Foster in 2003. Keep in mind that the Stinchcombs (1st and 2nd rounders) and 1st rounder Chris Terry, 2nd rounder Adam Meadows and 3rd rounder Jonas Jennings were OTs that UGA sent to the NFL around that same era too. By contrast, the only starting NFL OT that Richt has recruited to UGA was Cordy Glenn. (I do acknowledge that John Theus will be #2). So Donnan recruited the QBs (it is nuts to think that Donnan would have tried to get Cam Newton to play TE/DE and opened the possibility of moving to WR/DB with Deshaun Watson like Richt's staff did) and the difference makers up front on both sides of the line. Richt hasn't been able to consistently do either and you see the results.
The final thing: running a program. Consider that successful coaches like the Sabans, Carrolls, Meyers, Stoops etc. have "coaching trees", guys who have gone on to head coaching jobs at other major schools. (Example: at one point nearly half the head coaches in the Big 12 were former Bob Stoops assistants.) But the next guy who goes directly from Mark Richt's staff to a head coaching job at a major school will be the first. And Richt assistants have only gotten 2 jobs at MINOR schools: Bobo at Colorado State and VanGorder at Georgia Southern (who was FCS at the time). Even Bobo comes with an asterisk: Colorado State previously had the very successful Jim McElwain and tried to replicate his tenure by hiring another long term SEC offensive coordinator. So, Saban had more to do with Bobo getting a head coaching job than Richt did.
It is more than just a largely underwhelming group of assistants. It is also that Richt has never successfully implemented a coherent system or philosophy on offense or defense. On defense UGA was basically 4-3 under BVG, 4-6 (with zone in the secondary!) under Martinez, switched to a 3-4 under Grantham, and now still play 3-4 but with an entirely different philosophy under Pruitt. But that can be forgiven: Richt is an offensive guy, right? Except that Richt spent his initial years in Athens trying and failing to implement the FSU offense while being his own coordinator, even though that offense wasn't really the best fit for David Greene or the WRs. Then he had a kinda sorta spread look with D. J. Shockley for a year. Then they went through the "pure pro style" era with Matt Stafford, followed by a couple of years of incoherency (including but not limited to a failed attempt to put in a wildcat/wild dawg package with Logan Gray and then trying to figure out what to do with Aaron Murray after Mettenberger got kicked out of school) before settling on a return to UGA power running/play action football and then scrapping that for Brian "trading on my dad's last name and accomplishments" Schottenheimer's west coast offense. It would be one thing if you could say that UGA was adapting their offense to their personnel like Mack Brown did during his most successful years at Texas going from a pro-style QB in Chris Simms and Major Applewhite to a zone-read option with Vince Young to a spread with Colt McCoy, but UGA only actually did that during the Matt Stafford era. The rest of the time, UGA was mostly trying and failing to put square pegs in round holes with Richt on offense.
Yes, Richt won games at UGA; a lot of them. But please consider:
UGA plays 3 OOC games against cupcakes and a 4th against greatly overmatched Georgia Tech (whose recruiting has fallen off the map under their current coach and particularly since 2010).
The SEC East has 4 teams (South Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri, Vanderbilt) who really don't recruit much better than Tech most years.
The other 2 traditional powers in the East are Florida and Tennessee. The Vols haven't won the SEC this century. They haven't won the SEC East since 2007, which was the last time before this season that they reached 8 wins, and their last team with fewer than 4 losses was 2004 (when they lost 3, as they did in 2002) and they lost 5 in 2002. Add it all up and Richt only played a single top 10 Tennessee team - the 2001 edition - to which Richt lost. As a matter of fact, Richt is 1-3 against the 4 Tennessee teams to win 10 games, including a 35-14 embarrassment by the 2007 team that UGA fans strangely insist should have played for the national title despite their best victories coming against a pair of 9-4 Auburn and Florida teams and also an 8-5 Kentucky team (Auburn and Kentucky at home, Florida at a neutral site).
Florida meanwhile has been feast and famine, but truthfully mostly famine (the failed Zook and Muschamp regimes, the beginning and end of the Meyer era, meaning that Florida only reached 10 wins 6 times in the Richt era). Imagine if Richt had played Spurrier and Fulmer at their peaks in the 1990s when Florida only failed to reach 10 wins thrice (when they won 9) and Tennessee was one step behind.
Then you have Georgia's other SEC foe: Auburn, who was great in 2012, 2010 and 2004, good in 2006 but has otherwise been a mess throughout the Richt era, even in the years when they exploited similarly weak scheduling (back when the Mississippi schools were terrible for instance, and Auburn doesn't even have a regular OOC rival like Tech so their 4 games are generally even weaker than UGA's) to scratch out 9 wins despite real problems scoring points under Tuberville or stopping anybody in the years since.
So add it all up ... how many wins does Richt have over teams that finished ranked in the top 10 in the final poll (not teams that were in the top 10 when UGA played them but finished up 7-6 or 8-5)? Not very many. How many wins does Richt have over teams that finished with fewer than 3 losses? Virtually none. How many wins does Richt have over teams that finished in the top 5 in the final polls, including (for example) teams that went on to win the SEC and/or play for the national title? Nada. Zip. None. This means that in 15 years, Richt has zero big wins. That is the bottom line. Richt has nothing that should be considered a "big win" by a program of UGA's caliber. In fact, the biggest win of Richt's career came in the 2005 SEC championship game against a 3 loss LSU team. That was the best, most talented team that Richt has ever beaten ... one that was riddled with injuries (much of their OL and their entire scholarship depth chart at RB out due to injury, and oh yes UGA knocked out their starting QB in the first quarter) and exhausted because of having to play 13 consecutive weeks due to Hurricane Katrina.
Final analysis: Richt is a great guy. But as a coach, UGA can and should do better.
