Maybe it is time to admit that Georgia’s Mark Richt is a pretty good coach.
Let’s face it, whenever the Bulldogs lose a game Georgia fans are ready to turn up the heat under Richt’s rear end. They seem to always be sitting on ready and looking for a reason to go after their coach. It seems like a counter-productive way to treat a coach who came into this season with 118 wins and only 40 losses in 12 seasons, good for a .747 winning percentage.
So what happened to open the season?
Georgia lost to Clemson and the “time to make a change’ group began to holler loudly once again. But a month later we realize Clemson is a pretty good team and Tahj Boyd is one of the most productive quarterbacks in the nation. Losing to Clemson 38-35 is no disgrace.
Richt’s team has bounced back from the Clemson loss with four straight wins over South Carolina, North Texas, LSU and Tennessee. And Richt has had to win the last two with his hands tied behind his back because of injuries.
Before the Tennessee game Georgia lost sophomore tailback Todd Gurley to an ankle injury and then receiver Malcolm Mitchell was lost for the season to a torn ACL. During the Tennessee game the players kept going down. Keith Marshall, Gurley’s backup, went down with a knee injury and was soon followed to the sideline after knee injuries to receivers Justin Scott-Wesley and Michael Bennett. Later in the game punter Collin Barber left the game with a concussion. On Sunday, Richt announced that Marshall and Scott-Wesley have joined Mitchell and will miss the rest of the season.
Still Richt was able to look down his bench and come up with replacements and the Bulldogs found some answers in tailback J. J. Green, who finished with 17 carries for a career-high 129 yards, and Brendan Douglas, who had 10 carries for 25 yards and a touchdown. He also grabbed his first career reception, a 32-yarder on a third-and-6 play with under a minute to play that moved the ball down to the Tennessee 13-yard line on the game-tying drive late in the fourth quarter. With three top receivers out of the game, Rantavious Wooten and Chris Conley combined for 11 catches for 102 yards and three touchdowns and the Bulldogs won in overtime.
Richt once again reached into his hat and pulled out a rabbit. So it is safe to say he must be the luckiest coach since Les Miles, or he’s a pretty good coach who has a pretty good recruiting staff that keeps the talent pipeline open and running.
“A lot of things were going on,” said Richt after the Tennessee game. “A lot of guys got hurt, a lot of guys couldn’t finish the game. I can at least say that. It was obvious to everybody in that regard. So players had to step up, young players had to step up. Mike Bobo, the play caller, he’s trying to figure out who is in, who can do what, what they know, and it handcuffed us just a tad bit, but we just kept playing, kept fighting and found a way to win.”
One of the reasons for the win was Green, a 5-foot-9, 183-pound freshman from Kingsland, Georgia. Green, who started the season knowing playing time behind Gurley and Marshall was going to be hard to come by, wasted no time in taking advantage of the opportunity to carry the ball.
As a high school senior, Green led Camden County to the Georgia state quarterfinals by recording 39 tackles, three interceptions, a sack and 919 yards rushing and scoring 16 touchdowns.
Green is short and compact, which may work to his advantage on a field full of big, athletic players. Defenses may have trouble seeing him.
“I don’t know, there’s probably a little bit to that, but I think when you have a guy that’s not very tall but he’s very powerful, a very strong kid,” Richt said. “You hear that in football that the low man wins. If you get under somebody’s pads, you got a chance to dip and lift and drive a guy and he’s got an advantage about getting low on people. Not many people try to get under him when they tackle him so he has the advantage when it comes to the contact point and he just drives his legs and he’s a strong kid.”
One thing that has helped Green is that he enrolled early and went through spring drills and was the leading rusher in the G-Day Game.
“If he wasn’t a mid-year enrollee I don’t know if he’d be playing tailback right now. We didn’t have a lot of backs for the spring and we wanted to see what he could do there,” Richt said.
“When we signed him we weren’t sure if he was going to be a corner or wide receiver, we didn’t really think tailback but then we saw a need in the spring and he was willing to do it. He learned it, and he was actually pretty darn good at it in the spring so we feel like he’s found a good home. Without being here in January I don’t even know if he’d be a tailback right now.”
But Green has stepped up and eases some of the concern about losing Marshall for the season and Gurley week to week. Richt said they won’t push Gurley to play before he is completely healthy.
“We’re not going to push him any faster. We like the two true freshman backs that have played recently, we think that they’re good football players,” Richt said. “A.J. Turman is a talent and the other two guys [Kyle] Karempelis and [Brandon] Harton have played well for us before. The last thing we want to do is rush the thing on Todd.”
Georgia has another tough assignment this weekend when undefeated Missouri comes to Athens for the first time. The question now is will Richt have to pull more rabbits out of his hat?