So, it took me a while to decompress from that handling we got on Saturday…and it was a handling. The truth is, it will take me a while to get over it. I've had to do a lot of soul searching. I mean, even after a 30-point victory over the Cocks, I still don't think I'll be over it. This is for 2 reasons:
1. I really thought they were a bit of a paper tiger. I knew they were good and had beat some good teams. But they were far better than I imagined. I was very impressed. Could they compete week in and week out in the SEC? I don't know, but they could sure compete in the East this year and they'd hold their own. If they had our schedule, I'd predict them to go 12-0 or 11-1.
2. We were far less prepared than I imagined. Everything. There's too many things to name. We weren't prepared for the first drive, weren't prepared for the short passing game, weren't prepared to have to replace Ogletree, weren't prepared to protect Murray. Heck, it was a million things. It disgusted me. With a $3 million dollar job on the line, I think I'd be prepared for everything, because I think I'd like making $3 million. Sometimes I wonder if Richt does. I really, really expected us to win by double digits on Saturday. Not because I'm a homer. I thought we were just that much better than them. This is why I'm not a prognosticator.
Now, my shock aside…
Saturday is HUUUUUUUUGE for Georgia and Mark Richt. It's the most important game of his career. We have not beaten a really good team since Tech '09. That's a long time. At some point, we've got to beat a good team. At the beginning of the year, we thought these were the best 2 teams we'd play. If you go 10-2 and lost do the 2 best teams you played…is that really a great year? At some point, you've just got to do it when all eyes are watching. Everybody's watching on Saturday. Win, and we start to think that maybe we can make something out of this. If we lose, I'm not sure we can recover. I think the fan base will turn, the team will begin to slip and Richt will lose the team. We're just losing too many games.
Don't give me victories. Those things don't matter as much as losses. In 12 game seasons, losses are the only things we can compare to previous years. In '91 and '92, we had 2 really great years. We lost 3 in '91, and won our bowl game. We beat a really good Clemson team, LSU, Auburn, and Tech, and Tech was good. In '92, we lost 2 by a gnats hair, beat South Carolina in Columbia handily (the last time that happened), beat Auburn and Tech. We won a New Year's day bowl and our tailback finished 3rd in New York. We followed that up w/ a 6 loss season in '93. It was a tough year with an absolutely brutal loss in Jax. We then lost only 4 in '94 against one of the hardest schedules in UGA history. We played @ South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, & Auburn. We hosted Tennessee, Clemson, and Tech…and only lost 4! We didn't make a bowl, and Coach Dooley wanted to give Goff another year with the reverse of that schedule. In '95, we experienced the worst string of injuries in school history, literally losing our 1st & 2nd string QBs and TBs and our All-American LB for the season. We lost 6 games, including the bowl. We fired Ray before he lost the 6, though. 3 straight seasons of 6 losses, 4 losses and 5 losses was enough.
Mark Richt has lost 5, then 7. We're 0-1 now. Ray Goff lost 14 in 3 seasons and we fired him. Mark Richt has lost 13 in 2 seasons and 1 game. I'm not saying…I'm just saying.
The caveat to all that is that we have been no friend of Richt when it comes to scheduling. We've simply scheduled in a way that is too difficult, and it makes judging our performance hard to figure. It's very difficult to judge what we're doing vs. other schools because it's apples to oranges. In the last 5 years (+ Saturday's opener), Florida is 4-1 vs. FSU. They are undefeated in the rest of their non-conference games, excluding bowl games. This is because they have scheduled guaranteed home wins in those games. In 5 years, we are also 5-1 vs. GT, which has been a much better program than FSU for most of those 5 years. However, we have lost 3 non-conference games. Would we feel different if our record in '09 was 9-4 and in '10 it was 7-6? And the proverbial "Would we have lost to the 'Cocks in '07 had we not played the Pokes?" and "Would we have lost to 'Bama had we not traveled to Tempe the week before?"
I hope we can recover from this game. It was fun to play in it, but at the end of the day…it was useless. It taught us something, but it got us an L. We don't need to play in that kind of game. We just don't. We're already playing at a disadvantage because we don't over sign, there's no need to make it worse by over-scheduling. I'm not crying. This is just simply a fact. I don't know if we'd have a false sense of hope if we'd have played Lafayette on Saturday, I just know we'd be 1-0 and feel a whole lot better getting ready to play the Cocks in the games that really matter. Of course, it'd be great to beat Boise, and that's no excuse for the performance we saw, just an observation on the overall state of things.
What does it all mean? I have no idea. I can only imagine Oregon and VT fans felt the same way the last 2 years. They both went on win their conference, and I wonder what they felt in Pasadena and South Beach thinking back on that opening game. I'll bet they thought, "We ain't worth a flip and we just got beat by a 3rd world country. USC/FSU is going to kill us." Is is possible? Yes. We have a boatload to fix. A boatload, I tells ya. But it can happen. I'm hoping it happens.
I just want Mark Richt to look really P.O.'d. Is that too much to ask? Just be angry. I think we all have to wait to reserve judgment till about 8 p.m. on Saturday night. I'm hoping I'm walking back on the railroad tracks saying to some stranger, "Man, Boise must be really good."
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