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.