EDITORIAL: Breaking up is not so hard to do
It's almost akin to the breakup of a 15-year-old marriage, that of University of Georgia football fans and its now former head coach Mark Richt. The cause of the breakup on the divorce decree wasn't unfaithfulness. No, Richt was faithful to the red and black to the end. He was Dawg to the core. Did he win? Like no other coach before him with a .740 average. So why the divorce?
A football is shaped like an inflated pig's bladder. It's hard to predict which way it will bounce. The only thing more unpredictable are fans of the prolate spheroid. When a team is winning, everybody's happy, its players and its coaches are gods on the gridiron. Fans go around shaking fists and giving chest bumps to each other, but when they lose, the pride flows out like air from a punctured balloon. If that happens too often to too many of the wrong teams divorce is inevitable.
Richt is a winner, yes, but in the Southeastern Conference, the one conference in the nation that's supposed to be the biggest, baddest football conference in the nation, winning isn't everything. UGA hasn't won a national title in 35 years. And they've only been close once back in 2012 when Alabama took them out 32-28 in the SEC championship game, but even that game would have only given them a spot in the BCS process. But give Richt credit, he did win two SEC championships during his tenure, but the last one was a decade ago.
This year it seemed as though the handwriting was on the wall. For the second year in a row, the Dawgs top running back, Nick Chubb, goes down with a season ending injury. Not much good to say after that. Though UGA athletics director Greg McGarity waited until after the Georgia Tech game, won by UGA 13-7, the divorce papers were really signed and sealed in Jacksonville during the Georgia-Florida game. A bad Florida team beat Georgia 27-3.
Even though UGA would win its last four games after the Florida debacle (it took overtime for the Dawgs to beat Georgia Southern 23-17), it was pretty clear this marriage was done.
Irreconcilable differences. Unlike marriages, where some period of time passes before actively courting again, the university, at least, will immediately try to woo a suitable mate. Hope springs eternal.
This story was originally published December 1, 2015 at 9:47 PM with the headline "EDITORIAL: Breaking up is not so hard to do ."