ATHENS -- Mark Richt cut a lonely figure one night last week after practice. Having just finished a combative interview session, the Georgia head football coach had changed into church clothes. As he strode from his office to his car, checking his phone, Richt was visible to the same reporters who had been part of the grilling posse during the previous 48 hours.

It was a profound moment, in its own way. The coach under fire, walking silently out of the football building, the onlookers wondering how many more of those walks might he have remaining.

If you listen to various pronouncements, the answer is less than a season’s worth, perhaps less than that. Two days after Georgia dropped to 0-2 with a loss to South Carolina, a headline on SI.com asked: “Is Mark Richt done?” A writer in the Florida Times-Union opined that “Mark Richt looks done at Georgia.” A.J. Harmon, a former Georgia player who transferred to South Alabama this summer, tweeted during the game that the “hot seat gonna be empty soon.”

OK, time to be a kill-joy to those who want to see heads roll right away.

No, it’s not over. It’s not done. It’s way too early for anyone to declare with any certainty how this is going to play out.

Greg McGarity, who as Georgia’s athletics director will decide Richt’s fate, didn’t feel compelled on Monday to say anything either way.

“We played two games this season. We played two excellent teams,” he said, before pushing back a bit on the idea of a close loss to South Carolina being a great thing.

“I don’t think there’s anybody in our program that has any comfort level of moral victories. We’re past that as a program. We should be past that as a program. (But) I think people, like any other event, the general public, whether they know much about football or not, everybody can recognize effort, everyone can recognize whether the team is prepared.”

In other words, McGarity’s evaluation continues on a “week by week” basis, as he said later.

What complicates matter is we don’t know if Georgia is 0-2 because it played two very good teams or it would’ve been 0-2 if it had played most teams on its schedule.

Is Georgia better than Mississippi? Probably. But is it good enough to beat Ole Miss in Oxford? We’ll see.

Is Georgia better than Mississippi State? That’s still a good question.

What about Tennessee? What about Florida?

The team that was throttled by Boise State would probably have another losing season. The team that out-played South Carolina for much of the game might be good enough to win the SEC East. And those two games are all we have so far, way too small a sample size for any momentous decisions to be made.

The e-mails to McGarity, which he says he reads and responds to if they’re civil, improved in tone after Saturday’s near-win over the Gamecocks.

“I think and you’ll hear me say this every week, regardless of what sport, you continue to evaluate things every week,” he said. “I think judging from everything, it was a competitive game. I guess what everybody wanted to see. And I think that’s probably the tone of everything I’m getting, is the remarkable difference between game one and game two. I mean the result is the same. But I think you saw a difference (in how the team played).”

McGarity also agreed, when asked the question in leading form, that he won’t make a judgment based on a specific record or whether he beats a certain team. It’s not a matter of needing to win the division -- or win a certain amount of games -- for Richt to come back in 2012. That’s just part of the evaluation process.

“That’s the job of an athletic director. That’s why I have never and will never put a number of games for a coach to win,” McGarity said. “I’m just not doing that. I think that just leads you into situations that don’t allow you to properly evaluate an entire program. You have to have a sense, that’s just a part of the total evaluation every week.”

Richt made that solitary walk from his office to his truck again on Monday night. He will make it again. Whether he will make it with moving boxes at the end of the season -- or even during it -- still very much remains in the air.