It is hard to remember it now, but just two years ago Georgia coach Mark Richt was considered to be on college football’s proverbial hot seat.
Now, he’s still sitting, but not on a hot seat. Instead he is a coach on the brink of a national championship.
Wait a minute, before we get carried away let’s take a look at just where the likeable coach of the Georgia Bulldogs finds himself in 2012 as compared to where he was prior to the 2011 season.
Georgia was coming off a 6-7 season in 2010 and then the Bulldogs opened the 2011 season with back-to-back losses. The heat on Richt had gone from simmer to broil. But like a cat with nine lives, Richt was not finished. Far from it.
Richt brought the Bulldogs back to life and in the process he moved right off the hot seat.Georgi are bounded from the 0-2 start to win ten straight games and capture the SEC East championship. They lost the SEC Championship game and a triple overtime decision to Michigan State in the Outback Bowl and Richt was given a three-year contract extension that will keep him in Athens through the 2016 season.
This year, the Bulldogs tied for the SEC East title but earned a second consecutive trip to the SEC Championship Game, where a win overAlabama on Saturday would put Richt and the Bulldogs in the BCS National Championship Game against Notre Dame.
Will Georgia’s SEC Championship Game experience this time around against Alabama be different from the 2011 game against LSU?
“I think last year after 6-7 the year before and 0-2 to start, we were just fighting for our lives,” said Richt. “We had won 10 in a row, and we were able to win the Eastern Division after going down that opening game. It was a cause for celebration. This year we definitely celebrated those things. They are very important to us. Winning the East is a big deal, and beating Georgia Tech is always a big deal to us, so we celebrated those things.
“I think they’re hungry for some more, and we just want to have a better performance than we had a year ago inAtlanta. I think the celebration wasn’t quite as hard as it was a year ago.”
Georgia comes into the game on a six-game winning streak and playing its best football of the 11-1 season. It has a ton of playmakers in quarterback Aaron Murray, running backs Todd Gurley and Keith Marshall, wide receivers Malcolm Mitchell and Tavarres King, nose tackle Jon Jenkins, linebackers Alec Ogletree and Jarvis Jones and safety Bacarri Rambo among others.
Georgia will go against the defending national champion and the current SEC West Division title-holders in Alabama, a team that also brings an 11-1 record into the game and fresh off a dominating 49-0 win overAuburn.
“The last five years they’ve won 59 games. That’s the most in the history of the SEC, and the last four years they’ve won 48 games. That’s just one off of the NCAA mark in that period of time,” said Richt. “If they beat us they would tie it, and if they win the next game they would break the national record. They’re just at a time where they’re dominating college football really.”
Georgia was a dominating team in the 1980s under Vince Dooley and Richt has drawn on that tradition in returning the Bulldogs back to a place of prominence in the Southeastern Conference — as well as in college football nationally.
“When I first came toGeorgiaI was a first-year head coach and I was just hoping to survive. I was hoping to do a good job, and I felt like the Lord was leading me to this opportunity, and my wife and I took it in faith,” Richt said. “We just started trying to do things that in a way we hoped would be able to sustain itself over time. I felt likeGeorgiahad all the resources, the fan base, the passion, the administration, facilities, the talent base in the state ofGeorgia. I thought it had all the ingredients to be one of the best — if not the best -teams in the country.
“I really didn’t know a lot of history. I knew about the Herschel Walker era, the Vince Dooley era and the national championship of 1980. I was surprised to hear it had been 20 years sinceGeorgiahad won the Southeastern Conference, but I found that out after I got here.
“My goal really has been to try to on a daily basis do the best job I can do. We have a lot of people excited about the possibilities of what’s happening right now, but that’s something that I can’t really focus on right now. It’s fun for the fans, but right now I have to keep my vision on the things I can control.”
The current question is whether the Bulldogs can control the Crimson Tide and reach the BCS Championship Game? It will be a matchup of two teams with plenty of similarities, but winning the game will come down to, according to the Georgia coach, the things that always wins football games.
“I think we’ve been playing pretty solid football on both sides of the ball. I think our special teams have been solid. Certainly not spectacular, but they’ve been solid,” Richt said.
“I think that’s what you got to do. You got to play a good, solid game. You got to be able to run the ball good enough to make your play action pass worth it, you got to be able to reduce some yardage on first or second downs.
“Defensively you got to be able to get after people and you got to be able to get in the red zone area and force some field goals instead of touchdowns. We are doing a lot of the things you need to do. We’ll have to wait and see what happens Saturday.”
Regardless of the outcome, it is a good bet that Richt has vacated that hot seat for a long, long time.