I'm going to make a statement that shouldn't be shocking, and yet somehow I think a lot of people have missed this idea: You can love Kirby Smart without bashing Mark Richt.
Isn't that amazing?
By the way Georgia fans talk about Richt, you'd think he left the Dawgs with a .250 winning percentage and had set the program back decades in scandal and player attrition.
Instead, you're talking about a coach who had a .740 winning percentage with the Dawgs and who won two SEC championships.
I get that there were lean years towards the end. I get that we can stick on individual games and say he should've made this decision versus that decision. There are certainly fair criticisms of Mark Richt that can be uttered.
What makes no sense to me is why Georgia fans still want to rail against a man who did so much for the University and the athletics program.
The latest round of blame has come with all the talk of Jeremy Pruitt and whether or not he had a detrimental effect on the program. Aaron Murray recently said that he doesn't believe Pruitt has the proper mentality to be a head coach, a statement which has divided the fanbase and the media over what is, quite frankly, nothing.
Then again, look at that smug, handsome son of a gun.
That's one person's opinion, and as some have rightly pointed out, Murray didn't even play for Pruitt. Murray's last season was in 2013, Pruitt came on board for the Dawgs as DC in 2014. There may have been a little overlap as Murray did his pro-day preparations and spent a little time on campus in Pruitt's tenure, but he was never directly playing for Pruitt.
Personally, I think Pruitt is going to surprise some people at Tennessee if he can get out from under the shadow of Phil Fulmer, and that's a pretty big shadow for multiple reasons, but I respect Murray's opinion.
But with the resurgence of Murray and Pruitt as prominent figures in the UGA sports conversation, the fanbase has devolved once more into a frothing disdain for the former HC.
"Richt was soft and couldn't manage Pruitt's ego," some say. "Richt was too nice to fire a guy who was toxic for the program," others espouse.
There were a lot of rumors floating around that Pruitt was a problem for the staff, sure, and that he might've been a little rude. But he thrived at Alabama and Florida State, didn't he? And while Saban might be a domineering enough personality to rein in someone like that, do we really think Jimbo Fisher is better about managing people than Richt?
If you do, let me offer exhibit A: Jameis Winston.
While I have almost zero "inside knowledge" of what goes on in the UGA Athletic Association, let me offer an opinion on what I think was going on with Pruitt. I don't think it was Richt he kept butting heads with.
I think it was Greg McGarity.
Remember when Pruitt famously lambasted the Georgia facilities? He kept saying that our facilities were subpar and that we couldn't keep up in recruiting because of it.
Is that Richt's fault? Is Richt the guy who's going to get bent out of shape over that? If anything, Pruitt probably said out loud what Richt wanted to.
It has long been my opinion that McGarity had hamstrung Richt from Day One. When McGarity came on campus in August of 2010, he wanted nothing more than to install his own guy. In his mind, McGarity wants so badly to have the legacy of Jeremy Foley at Florida, the longtime Gators AD who is credited with building that program.
Unfortunately, up until very recently, most of Georgia's most successful coaches were all hired by another man whose name looms large over the campus, and that's Vince Dooley. Former AD Damon Evans also had a few successful hires, but his tenure was so short that the list is pretty small.
When you look at the thriving programs at the start of McGarity's time with the Dawgs like gymnastics, women's basketball, tennis, women's equestrian, and swimming, those were all Dooley hires.
And yes, the football seasons of 2008 through 2010 were disappointing to say the least, but the program was overall in a much better situation than it had been before Richt arrived.
Foley's saying at Florida was, "If it must be done eventually, it must be done immediately." The idea there was that if a coach had to be let go one day, then that day might as well be today.
Perhaps Foley had a solid instinct for that sort of thing, I don't know Florida's program well enough to judge that, but McGarity tried to adopt that philosophy with varying degrees of success at UGA.
Out of 19 varsity NCAA sports sponsored at UGA, McGarity has fired and hired coaches for 12 of them. Sometimes multiple times.
I won't argue that all of these coaches were stalwarts who deserved to stay, there are always going to be places where improvements can be made, but that's a pretty large amount of turnover in a relatively short amount of time, especially considering how many of those programs were vacated in the first three years under McGarity.
Sure, the two football seasons before McGarity came in were a little less than stellar. The 2008 team underperformed after coming in as the top team in the nation, and then the 2009 team went 8-5 and finished up in the Advocare Independence Bowl. In Shreveport. I would know, I was there.
ESPN can prove it!
It's easy to say that no Georgia team should ever have a slump like that, and I fully agree with you. There were some bad years.
The 2010 team, McGarity's first, finished with a losing record after losing to UCF in the Autozone Liberty Bowl. I would know. I was there. And it was raining.
It looked like Richt's tenure might be coming to an end.
But then in 2011, we saw things turn around. Aaron Murray came into his own after a stellar freshman season that saw much fewer wins than it should have. He led the Dawgs to an SEC Championship Game appearance, and a much needed win over the Gators to snap a three-year skid in Jacksonville. After the home loss to South Carolina that put us at 0-2 to start the season, the Dawgs rattled off 10 straight wins to ultimately finish up 10-4.
Had touted freshman running back Isaiah Crowell not been such a sourpuss, that 2011 team probably could have picked up another win or two.
Then the 2012 team blew everyone away by finishing the regular season 11-1, defeating the second-ranked Gators 17-9 in Jacksonville by keeping Florida out of the end zone all night, and coming within inches of defeating Alabama for an SEC title and challenging Notre Dame for the national championship.
And I have a hard time believing that McGarity enjoyed any of that because it meant he had to give Richt a little more time.
What he didn't have to do was give Richt more resources.
As Pruitt famously said, and as a lot of people recognized, Georgia was lagging behind in the arms race that is college football. While Clemson was building a training facility that featured mini golf and arcades, the Dawgs were busing to Flowery Branch for practice when it rained.
Could Richt sign the contracts to build those facilities? Could he run the capital campaigns to raise the money, despite the fact that UGA's "strategic reserves" for projects like that were overflowing?
That grand discrepancy falls on McGarity, and that leaves us with two options. Either McGarity was inept and didn't realize what Georgia needed to compete in recruiting, or McGarity was intentionally short-changing Richt with the hopes that the HC would falter and need to be replaced.
The 2013 football season started to give McGarity the ammunition he wanted. With a road loss to Vanderbilt and a season-opening loss to Clemson, the Dawgs were pretty quickly out of the national picture in what was Murray's senior season. Never mind that everyone on that team kept getting hurt.
The 2014 season would provide a little more ammunition. Even though the Dawgs beat Clemson in one of the best games of the year, a game that featured a player from Georgia's backyard everyone still blames Richt for not getting who would go on to win the Tigers a national championship, and even though we were considered a dark-horse playoff candidate late in the season, an embarrassing loss to the hapless Gators and a devastating OT loss to Tech all-but sealed Richt's fate.
Then 2015 losses to Tennessee (the famous Chubb injury game...no, I will NOT link to that video) and Florida and Alabama, plus a truly miserable offense, signed Richt's severance package for him.
So McGarity was finally free to bring in his guy. And he immediately wanted to hire...Dan Mullen. At least those are the rumors. I've heard several people say that McGarity had a short-list of three names, which included Smart, but his pick was Mullen.
I've never been so glad that you're not Dan Mullen.
If some nameless big-dollar boosters hadn't gotten in the way, we could have Mullen and Smart would probably be at Florida right now.
I'll admit, that last part is unsubstantiated and can't be proven, but there were whispers. I forget who the third name on McGarity's list was, to be honest.
The first two seasons with Smart have been something of a rollercoaster ride. The 2016 season was ultimately very upsetting, with the most home losses Georgia had seen in almost 20 years, and a continually struggling offense. The defense was still elite, thank goodness, but the offense was pretty rough.
Then we all know what happened in 2017. It looks like the Kirby Smart train is getting rolling in Athens, with no end in sight. The recruiting classes are great, the team seems to be moving in the right direction. We just won the SEC and a major bowl game in only the second-year of a new head coach's tenure.
Which was all exactly what we could have said 15 years ago under Richt.
I don't bring this up to denigrate Smart, I'm as happy as anyone about what he's doing. I just think it merits reminding people that, in most categories, Smart hasn't done anything Richt hadn't also accomplished.
Had there been a playoff in 2002, the Dawgs most likely would have played first-ranked Miami in a semifinal and, had we won, would've played for the national championship.
Same story in 2007 (maybe, but that's a whole other story) and 2012. There's a chance that the Dawgs would've played for championships in both of those season with a playoff system in place.
Look, I'm not advocating for bringing Richt back. I'm not advocating for getting rid of Smart. I'm not even going to say it was a mistake to trade Richt for Smart, although I will admit that we can't really know for sure about that until about five years have passed for Smart, or until he wins his first national title. Whichever comes first.
All I'm saying is that Georgia fans need to drop this insane hatred they have for Richt and need to stop taking every chance they can to bash the guy. He won us almost 150 games and put us in the position we needed to be in for Smart to come in and take this team to the playoff so quickly.
For all the bellyaching about recruiting and how Richt lost key battles, and yes, there were some players we missed on that would've been very helpful, most of the impact players on Smart's SEC Championship and Rose Bowl Championship team were Richt recruits.
Again, I don't say this to denigrate Smart, he has clearly done a great job of recruiting in his own right, but we need to quit this lie that Richt was a terrible recruiter and a terrible coach and a terrible leader for the UGA football program.
You don't spend 15 years at a university, win 145 games, two conference titles, and go 9-5 in bowl games by being bad. And UGA would not have been in the playoff this quickly under Smart if not for everything Richt had done to build the program and to keep it relevant in the college football landscape.
Sure, Smart probably could have eventually turned the Dawgs around had the program been a total wreck, but it would've taken at least three or four years. Not one.
So can we all please take Chris Crocker's advice and leave Mark Richt alone? Let him do his best at Miami, let us enjoy our own team here in Athens, and all get over this stupid obsession. Frankly, these fans are acting like the jealous boyfriend who breaks up with a girl and then gets mad when she starts dating another guy. Even though they're dating someone just as good, or even better.
It looks petty.
Plus, if we all really need a reminder into who the worst coach for Georgia was, look no further than Mike Ekeler. He probably doled out more concussions to our team than the opponents did.