There Goes Chubb, There Goes Another Loss, There Goes Another Georgia Season

It was gruesome to watch.

On the game’s first play from scrimmage, Nick Chubb took the handoff from Greyson Lambert.  Finding no room to run between the tackles, he bounced it outside as he so often does.  After a two yard gain, he was knocked out of bounds by two Tennessee defenders.  The second hit spun him around and his left leg contorted and went backward.  When you saw the replay, you knew that something horrible had happened.  At one point CBS actually stopped showing the replay because it was just too gruesome to watch.

It took forever for Chubb to get up.  They had trouble getting him onto the cart to go into the locker room.  At one point he actually passed out for a minute.  But eventually they did get him onto the cart and into the locker room.  When next we saw him, it was the second half and he was in sweats, lying flat on a table.

Richt, ever the optimist, expressed confidence in his postgame comments that Chubb’s injury would probably not require surgery.  Um…we’ll see what the medical staff has to say about that on Monday.

Knoxville has played host to more than its share of horrible Georgia nightmares.  The worst was two years ago, when Georgia lost running back Keith Marshall and wide receiver Justin Scott-Wesley and several other major organs while blowing a huge lead and scrambling to escape with a 34-31 overtime win.  Those injuries led to horrible back-to-back losses to Missouri and Vanderbilt which submarined Georgia’s 2013 season.

The conventional narrative is that when a key player goes down, it energizes the rest of the team to play strong and win for their fallen teammate.  But it would be foolish to expect that, based on what we have seen of this year’s team.  There should not have been much of a dropoff in Chubb’s absence; Sony Michel and Keith Marshall are both very capable playmakers.  For years Georgia has made a priority of recruiting well at the running back position, in the belief (absolutely correct) that in this league one can never have too many good running backs.  Yet the psyche of this team is just too fragile and unstable.  Anytime things don’t go their way, they go into absolute meltdown mode.  It happened last week against Alabama, when for the first time they encountered resistance from a quality opponent.  And you just had to know that it would happen again this week, that something of the magnitude of what happened on that dreadful first play would completely and totally destroy this team.

Sure enough, it did.  The offense struggled profusely for three quarters, netting only 15 yards in their first 11 plays and not making a single first down until deep into the first quarter.  Even with a 24-3 Georgia lead, there were cracks in the foundation.  Only one of Georgia’s three touchdowns came on offense.  The other two came via linebacker Leonard Floyd’s 96-yard fumble return and a 70-yard punt return by Reggie Davis that was almost called back due to a block in the back.  Two long second-quarter drives which yielded only a single Marshall Morgan field goal were a huge win for the beleaguered Tennessee defense.

And then it happened.  Tennessee scored two touchdowns in 37 seconds late in the first half, following a fumble by Sony Michel on a kickoff return.  Tennessee shredded Georgia 35-7 over the remainder of the game, scoring four touchdowns in five possessions.  A cobbled-together offensive line with several true freshmen gashed Georgia’s defense for 519 yards in offense.  It made me sick to my stomach that, as Joshua Dobbs running wild and free all night long with no one to stop him, it was these two freshmen offensive linemen on the right side of the ball (Jack Jones and Chance Hall are their names)–FRESHMEN!!!!!!!  MAKING THEIR FIRST EVER COLLEGIATE START!!!!!!!!!–who were manhandling our defense and opening huge holes for him.

Georgia had one last chance to tie the game but Davis dropped a perfectly thrown 56-yard would-be touchdown pass.  There would be one more threat as Georgia drove from their own 1 yard line to Tennessee’s 27 only to see Tennessee defender Brian Randolph break up Lambert’s pass to Malcolm Mitchell.

Checkmate.

Davis, on the dropped pass:  “I have to make that play….Then maybe we go to overtime or kick a field goal and win instead of me sitting here wishing I scored a touchdown.”

Alas, the rest of the season will see a lot more wishes than wins.

That’s how it always is here at Georgia.

Too Many Drills Are Being Left Unfinished

“Finish The Drill”.

It is the catchphrase of the Mark Richt era.  It is painted on the walls of the Georgia locker room.

It has become nauseatingly familiar to Georgia fans the world over, during the last decade or thereabouts.  This is The Drill:  Raise expectations all the way up to the stratosphere.  Crumble into a million little pieces under the weight of said expectations.  Rinse.  Repeat.

ICYMI (that’s “In Case You Missed It”, for those of you who are not millennials or otherwise conversant in the ways in which millennials express themselves via texting and social media):  Nick Saban and Alabama wiped their asses with Mark Richt and Georgia in Athens on Saturday.  It was absolute, abject humiliation, humiliation in a way that no major collegiate football program aspiring to be nationally relevant should ever in a million years be humiliated.

Think of the conquering monarch of antiquity, with his vanquished foe lying facedown in the mud, placing the heel of his boot on the neck of his vanquished foe.  Now imagine said monarch removing his pants and taking a big, fat, ugly shit all over the head of his vanquished foe.

It was the miserably failed “blackout” of 2008 all over again.  Oh, there was not a shred of black anywhere to be seen.  We were not stupid enough to try that again.  But in all other respects it was similar.

The buses were rocking back and forth at the Dawg Walk, as the players were waiting to unload.  The players were barking and woofing during pregame, and the Alabama players were none too pleased.  (Nick Saban was none too pleased that they even noticed.)  The hype videos were blaring with highlights from prior meetings with Alabama (though noticeably with nothing from 2008 to the present).

But the fans weren’t buying it.  In spite of all the hype, all the cheering, barking, and woofing, there was no sense whatsoever that “we’re gonna get ’em this time”.  Instead, there was a palpable sense of dread.  An awful expectancy that what wound up happening Saturday was exactly what was going to happen.

Since we’re talking about that horrifically failed “blackout” of 2008, let us note that it forms a sharp dividing line in Mark Richt’s tenure at Georgia.  Nothing that followed has been the same as what came before.

Consider this:  It took Mark Richt well into his third season at Georgia to experience his first true wipeout loss.  For the purposes of our discussion, we will define a “wipeout” as anything where the margin of defeat is greater than two touchdowns.  This did not happen until the 2003 SEC championship, when Georgia ran into an LSU team that was on its way to its first national championship since 1958.

It happened again in 2004, against an Auburn team that was en route to a perfect 13-0 season.  It happened against Tennessee in 2006 and 2007 (Tennessee was actually a decent team back then).  Only four wipeout losses in seven years.

And then it happened against Alabama in 2008.  Nothing has been the same since.

Georgia has not won the SEC or graced a major bowl since that horrific Alabama loss.  Every season has had at least one wipeout loss, and some have had multiple.  All told, there have been ten, not counting the Alabama loss.  The losses are not only becoming more frequent, they are becoming more emphatic.

What does this say about Georgia?  It says that we are a flimsy big-time program.  Meaning:  We look great until the moment when we don’t look great, and when we don’t look great, you’d better avert your eyes.

This comes back on coach Richt.

(Since we’re talking about coach Richt, let me repeat that I am NOT saying that we should fire him!!!!!  Firing a head coach is a risky move which should not be undertaken unless you are absolutely convinced that there is another coach who can do better and that said coach can be enticed to come to your program.  There are coaches out there who can do better than what Richt is doing.  Pete Carroll.  Urban Meyer.  Nick Saban.  Chip Kelly.  You get the idea.  There are only a handful of coaches out there who would certainly do better than Richt, and I do not see any of those guys beating a path to Georgia’s door.)

But there was once a time when Richt could be trusted to think of something.  There was once a time when the last thing you wanted to see on the opposing sideline in the fourth quarter of a tight game was Richt’s face.  If you saw it, you knew that Richt and his team would make a play to send you down in flames.

Alas, that face is not to be feared anymore.  It has gotten to where, when the checkers are equal (to borrow an Urban Meyer image), you should expect Georgia to lose.  And lose emphatically.

Not to say that Georgia is a bad team.  Full credit to Richt as recruiter:  He has stocked this program with so much top-shelf talent that it is hard to see another loss on the schedule.  (Except Florida.  Florida always beats us, even with lesser talent, and Florida is starting to look really good.  And Tennessee.  Tennessee has problems of its own, but Neyland Stadium has played host to way too many Georgia nightmares over the years.)

Georgia will win lots of games.  They might even win the SEC East, because the SEC East is just that bad.  But I do not see Georgia winning the SEC, let alone a national championship.  There is no reason whatsoever–except the law of averages–to believe that Georgia will ever win another game that matters.  Not in the foreseeable future, at least.

Coach Richt has the full support of his administration.  He has been given everything he could possibly want, from high-salaried assistants to that coming-soon indoor practice facility.  Yet the first real test of the 2015 season found us four touchdowns worse (would have been five if not for Nick Chubb’s 83-yard score which happened long after everyone had ceased to care) than a team we were favored to beat by 2 1/2 points.

That bothers me.

Does it bother you, Coach Richt?

“Finish The Drill”:  The catchphrase of the Mark Richt era.  Too many drills are being left unfinished.

This Has Happened Far Too Often

This has happened far too often.

Far too may times this has happened:  Games won, hopes raised, every goal sitting out there on the table just waiting to be had, crying out for a great performance against a great opponent to make us believe that this team, this program is capable of something special.  You know the rest.  Inevitably and without fail, Georgia wraps the fuse around its legs and pushes the plunger.  Boom.

If you’re looking for the reason why so many say Georgia will never amount to anything more than “1980 and five yards short”–well, you just saw it today, in living color.

It’s one thing to lose to Alabama.  Lots of teams do that.  It’s another thing entirely to be completely and utterly humiliated on your home field in a game in which so many, including the oddsmakers in Vegas, were deluded into believing that you and Alabama were equally matched.

You read that right, people.  We were actually a 2 1/2 point favorite against Alabama today.

Whatever they were smoking in Vegas this past week, I want some of it.

This picture of Greyson Lambert tells you all you need to know about how the game went today.

We couldn’t run the football.  That is our strength.  We couldn’t pass the football either, and we had been doing that pretty well the last two weeks.  Greyson Lambert against South Carolina and Southern:  33 of 35 for 496 yards, 5 touchdowns and 0 interceptions.  Greyson Lambert against Alabama:  Underthrew a wide-open Malcolm Mitchell to lead off the game.  10 of 24 for 86 yards, 0 touchdowns, an interception and a benching.  (And this was at home, in front of the home crowd.  God help us next week in Neyland Stadium.)  Not that Brice Ramsey was any better:  On the first play of the second half, he threw to Alabama safety Eddie Jackson who took it 50 yards for a touchdown that made it 31-3.

Game over.  Thanks for playing.  Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

We couldn’t play defense.  Jeremy Pruitt, the multimillion-dollar defensive coordinator who came here in 2014 by way of Florida State and Alabama, imported expressly for games like this, didn’t have a clue, let alone a prayer, let alone a fighting chance, against an offense with serious question marks at quarterback.  It was all your worst nightmares from the Willie Martinez and Todd Grantham eras, all coming to life again on this wretched, miserable afternoon.

Pruitt to the media after the game:

You don’t win games with emotion, you win with execution.  This is the first time they’ve played a game of this magnitude….  They were ready emotionally. But the mental part — you get your emotions tied into it, you start looking at other stuff and you create clutter for yourself.

OK, I get it.  Coaches can only do so much.  But this has happened far too often.

Saban dominated Richt.  Alabama’s offensive and defensive lines dominated Georgia’s.  We got punched in the mouth, started making turnovers, and basically went into full-on meltdown mode as soon as the other team started pushing us around just a little bit.  Well over half the crowd was long gone by the start of the fourth quarter.  And with them, over half the reasons to believe that this state of affairs will ever change–that Georgia will EVER amount to anything more than “1980 and five yards short”.

Seven years ago, Alabama led Georgia 31-0 at the start of the second half.  Today, at 1 minute and 53 seconds into the second half, Alabama led Georgia 31-3.  Guess that’s progress.

At this point Richt is going to tell his players and the media the same thing all football coaches tell their players and the media in this situation:  All our goals are still on the table.  We can still win the division.  We can still win the SEC.  We can still get into the playoff.  And if we get in, we can win.

All of the above is still true.  In theory, at least.  We can still win the division.  And we can still win the SEC.  And a one-loss SEC champion is surely a lock to get into the playoff.

Except when said one-loss SEC champion hails from the toxic waste dump that is today’s SEC East–and the one loss is a complete and total ass-whipping like what we saw today.  Oh yeah.  Georgia very nearly made the BCS title game back in 2012 with an ass-whipping like this on their resume.  But that was on the road, at South Carolina, back when South Carolina was actually pretty good.  Heads up:  South Carolina isn’t any good anymore.

Malcolm Mitchell said it best in comments to the media this past week, when he said that teams are judged by their opponents and by the results in those games.  So how to judge Georgia now, with four wins and a loss the size of Russia on our resume?  How can anyone who saw today’s game–especially in light of prior failures in similarly big moments–still dare to believe that Georgia has even a ghost of a chance of putting together a special season?

Had this been any other program that entered a much-ballyhooed game like this only to exit completely and utterly humiliated, we might have been able to shrug it off as just a lousy day at a lousy time.  But this is Georgia.  This is what we do.  And Lord knows, we do it far too often.  For the past two years we have had the best team in the SEC East by far, and failed to win it.  Just when you start thinking to yourself, “This year will be different”, reality comes charging in, grabs you by the throat and piledrives you to the ground, and you are reminded once again that this is Georgia.

This has happened far too often.

Your Move, Coach Richt

Coach Mark Richt celebrates after a big win a couple of years back. We won’t talk about what happened next.

It has been far too long since Georgia has had a memorable win that actually meant something.

Oh, there have been memorable wins.  But those wins have almost always been followed and overshadowed by even more memorable losses.

Example:  The 2014 season opened with an impressive win over Clemson which led many to expect huge things.  Just two weeks later we traveled to Columbia and got beat by a struggling South Carolina team.  Later that year we scored impressive road wins at Missouri and Arkansas, only to go to Jacksonville and have our asses handed to us by a Florida team that was only a week away from firing its head coach.

In 2013 we beat LSU 44-41 in a game for the ages, and there seemed no limit to what we would accomplish that year.  But then we started dropping bodies and got bodyslammed by Missouri and then Vanderbilt.

And in 2007, Nick Saban’s first year at Alabama, we beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa for only the second time in recorded history.  We then traveled to Knoxville to face a Tennessee team that had gotten boatraced by Cal and Florida, and got bodyslammed 35-14.  The significance of the Alabama win was greatly diminished later that year when they lost to–wait for it–Northeast Louisiana.

I could keep going, but I think you get the point.

We play Alabama this weekend.  Alabama always seems to win everything.  We always seem to win the Gator Bowl.

For some reason the oddsmakers in Vegas have us pegged as a 2 1/2 point favorite.  Whatever they’ve been smoking this week, I want some of it.  Because you just don’t put a program with 15 national titles and a coach with four championships on one sideline and expect them to get beat by the guys on the other sideline.  Not without a REALLY, REALLY GOOD reason.

We are 0-2 against Nick Saban and Alabama since that win back in 2007.  There is still a lingering headache from the failed blackout of 2008 and from national championship dreams that died on the Alabama five-yard-line in 2012.

We have a lot going for us this year:  the nation’s best running attack with Nick Chubb and Sony Michel, an improved defense, and a quarterback who suddenly looks poised, confident, and accurate (33 of 35 for 476 yards, 5 touchdowns, and 0 interceptions).  But then, we had a lot going for us in 2008: a potent offense headlined by Matthew Stafford, Knowshon Moreno, and a whole host of explosive receivers–only to get boatraced 31-0 in the first half and wind up losing 41-30.

By the way, we were 4-0 before that fateful day in 2008.  Same as we are today.

So you can probably understand if I’m just a little anxious about the game tomorrow.  And about what is to come for us in the weeks ahead if we should survive this test.

Being a Georgia fan is all about waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Because it always does, at some point.  Whether on the Alabama 5-yard-line in the SEC championship, or on a horrible day in Jacksonville at the end of October, or a horrible week in the middle of October that sees us go from firmly in control of the SEC East to dead on arrival in the SEC East.  Whether on a horrible night in Athens, in front of 92,000 fans all dressed in black, or on a horrible day in Knoxville that is best forgotten as soon as possible.

It isn’t for nothing that people say Georgia will never amount to anything more than “1980 and five yards short”.

Tomorrow is a prime opportunity to alter that perception.

In the sporting world, perception is reality.  It isn’t fair, but it’s true.  Until reality alters perceptions.

John Elway couldn’t win a Super Bowl, until he went off and won one at age 37.  The Boston Red Sox were forever cursed for trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees, until they won the World Series in 2004.  Longsuffering Atlanta sports fans were convinced their city would never have anything to celebrate, until the Braves slipped up and won a World Series.  (I’m not making this up, people.  Trust me.  It happened.)

You know the feeling, Coach Richt.  Because you have experienced the same thing.

A few years ago, Georgia was perceived as a program circling the drain and you were perceived as a coach who had lost his way.  An awful two-year stretch punctuated by a loss to Central Florida in the Liberty Bowl will do that.  Two awful losses to start the 2011 season certainly did not help matters.  But after ten straight wins and a return to the SEC championship game, reality had proven that perception wrong.

Four years later, you stand at a similar crossroads.  Like it or not, the debate is raging about whether Georgia is achieving at a level commensurate to the talent and resources at hand.  And the perception is that we are not.  Fair or not, the perception is that you have done a lot of great things but just can’t seem to win the big one, and that you will never win the big one.

Tomorrow you have a chance to alter that perception.

Your move, coach Richt.