Bill Shanks: Georgia made the right decision

It was time. In the end, this was just the right thing to do. Call it a firing. Call it stepping down. Whatever. Mark Richt's time was simply up at Georgia.

The past four games, in fact, meant nothing. This decision likely was made Halloween night, after Georgia had been humiliated once again by its biggest rival. Years from now we'll remember when Richt started his third-string quarterback against Florida in the biggest game of the year. We'll remember how it was Richt's final major decision as Georgia's football head coach.

Richt won a lot of games in Athens, but he didn't win the games a coach needs to keep a job forever. Those are championship games, and Richt never got to that level. He was so successful in his first five years, which endeared him to the fan base. But the past decade has simply not been as good.

Well, it was good, like this 9-3 season was good. But it wasn't great. College football is a world where greatness matters, especially in the South. Nick Saban changed all that, and Richt likely can blame Saban for this. The Alabama head coach has raised the bar to make it where good is no longer acceptable.

And Richt was good, very good, especially in his first seven years. He won the SEC championships in his second and fifth seasons. Against ranked opponents, Richt was 24-13, a .649 winning percentage, from 2001 through 2007. He finished second in the country in 2007, and the next summer, his team was on the cover of Sports Illustrated as the preseason favorite to win it all.

But the Alabama game in 2008 brought that momentum to a screeching halt. It was a blackout game, on a perfect late-September evening in Athens. Georgia was ranked third, while Alabama was ranked eighth. Saban was only in his second season, but his Crimson Tide got up 31-0 on Richt's Bulldogs. Georgia came back to make the final 41-30, but the damage had been done.

The Bulldogs got blown out five weeks later in Jacksonville, as the Gators won 49-10. Then a month later, Georgia Tech beat Richt for the first time, bouncing back from a 16-point halftime deficit to win by three points.

And Richt's program really was never the same. There was a 45-19 blowout loss to Lane Kiffin's Tennessee Volunteers in 2009, an embarrassing 10-6 loss to Central Florida in the Liberty Bowl in 2010, an awful 35-7 defeat at South Carolina in 2012 and back-to-back losses to Missouri and Vanderbilt in 2013.

Then 2014 rolled around.

Richt's Bulldogs had a tough three-point loss to the Gamecocks in South Carolina, making it four losses in five years to Steve Spurrier. Then as 13-point favorites in Jacksonville, the Bulldogs were embarrassed 38-20 by Florida. The Gators fired head coach Will Muschamp only a few weeks later. Then in the final regular-season game of 2014, Georgia Tech won in overtime 30-24 in a game that will be remembered for two words: squib kick.

The expectations for this season were tempered. There was an obvious quarterback issue from the start, as Georgia scrambled to find someone tp replace Hutson Mason. Brice Ramsey failed to win the position in the spring, and Faton Bauta was looked at as a bad fit. The Bulldogs found Greyson Lambert, a player from Jesup who had played a couple of years for the Virginia Cavaliers.

But Richt's once-heralded offense has been a disaster this season. His choice of Brian Schottenheimer to replace Mike Bobo as offensive coordinator was a huge mistake.

And isn't it ironic that the two games this season that got Richt in hot water were against the same two teams that caused the trouble back in 2008: Alabama and Florida. Georgia was blown out by Alabama again in Athens, and then with the SEC East still on the line in Jacksonville, Richt started Bauta and lost 27-3 to the Gators.

That was the final straw.

There were just more bad games in the final half of Richt's tenure than good games. They were close against Alabama in the 2012 SEC title game, but close doesn't count. We can argue all day whether Georgia would have beaten Notre Dame for the national title if it had not messed up at the end against Alabama, but it didn't happen.

Since 2008, Richt was 14-23 against ranked opponents, and that .378 winning percentage is drastically different than the .649 clip he had against ranked teams in his first seven years on the job. That matters. Richt was great at beating unranked teams (106-15 in his career), but he was falling short against the teams a coach must beat to keep his job.

There was just nothing impressive about this season. Georgia won five SEC games, but none of those teams finished with a winning record. Of the eight wins against FBS teams this season, only one (Georgia Southern at 8-3) has a winning record. The combined record of the nine teams Georgia beat is 41-65.

It was a 9-3 record. That's good. It's hard to fire a head coach who goes 9-3, but it just wasn't good enough.

There will be fear in the fan base about this move, but there shouldn't be. Sure, Tennessee fired a successful Phillip Fulmer after one bad season in 2008. He had led the Volunteers to a great run of success, but in his 17th season, Tennessee went 5-7, and Fulmer was fired.

Tennessee really hasn't been the same since. This season, Butch Jones, in his third season as the head coach, has the Vols at 8-4 and it's his second straight winning season. But firing Fulmer wasn't the issue. Tennessee just made bad hires to replace Fulmer with first Lane Kiffin and then Derek Dooley.

Georgia's next head coach is not guaranteed to be better than Richt. Ron Zook wasn't better than Spurrier at Florida, so the Gators fired him. After Urban Meyer left the Gators, Muschamp took over. He didn't work out, and they fired him. Now Jim McElwain looks like a good choice.

But who says the next head coach won't be better? You can't assume the next head coach will fail, and many Georgia fans have incorrectly believed no one will ever do better than Richt. Is that because Richt was better than Ray Goff and Jim Donnan? Maybe, but that success was in the first five years of his tenure.

Georgia hasn't won an SEC championship in a decade, and in that time, four different SEC programs have won seven national championships. How long were Georgia fans expected to wait?

Some contended that Richt was due the same patience as other good coaches. They pointed to the fact that legendary coaches like Vince Dooley, Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno took around 17 years before they won their first national title. But did that mean every Georgia head coach should be afforded a 17-year contract?

It didn't take Meyer long to win his national championships. He won it all in his second year in Florida and in his third season at Ohio State. Saban won in his fourth year at LSU and then in his third year at Alabama. Bob Stoops (Oklahoma) and Jim Tressell (Ohio State) both won national championships in their second seasons on the job, while Les Miles (LSU) and Pete Carroll (USC) won in their third seasons. And Jimbo Fisher won in his fourth season at Florida State.

Georgia fans had waited long enough, and most gave Richt a pass because they liked him as a man and because he won just enough to make it hard to want to fire him. But how could anyone be satisfied with this season? Georgia isn't even in the top half of the SEC, even with the 9-3 record.

There is another fear that the recruiting class Richt had going will now fall apart, but that should not be a concern. No one wants Georgia to lose heralded quarterback Jacob Eason, who looks like a future star. But no one recruit should hold a program hostage.

Most of Richt's recruiting classes have been great, with 10 of Richt's 15 classes ranked by Scout.com in the top 10. But how did the "Dream Team" in 2011 turn out? Or how about the 2013 class? They were both huge disappointments. Recruiting titles in February mean nothing, and with the talent not panning out, it became more of an indictment on Richt.

Richt had Matthew Stafford, Knowshon Moreno and Aaron Murray -- all great recruits. But Richt couldn't win big with them, so why should we believe Eason would have been any different under Richt's coaching?

This is risky. Richt is a beloved man and was a successful coach. But the Georgia administration did not need the fear of doing worse to influence a decision to try and make this program better. That's why it is doing this. The administration knows Richt was good, but it knows the resources are there for this program to be great.

Richt is a great man, but was he really a great football coach? Not in the past eight years. Not since that Alabama game in 2008. That's when things changed.

Georgia couldn't afford to keep paying Richt $4 million per season to simply be a good man. It couldn't pay him that much money to simply represent the university well and to help make men out of young boys. The Bulldogs need someone who can do that and win championships.

But it's more than just championships. Richt was 5-10 in his career against Florida. The Gators have now reclaimed the SEC East, and their first-year head coach just beat Richt with his backup quarterback. And to think that after Georgia was in the SEC title game against Alabama in 2012 it has not won the division with it being this weak was simply unacceptable.

The case against Richt was overwhelming, really. He had 15 years to make something happen, and being a man people loved was not enough to save his job. Richt was a good coach, but he was far from great. Georgia now has to simply go find someone better.

Listen to "The Bill Shanks Show" from 3-6 p.m. weekdays on WPLA Fox Sports 1670 AM in Macon and online at www.foxsports1670.com. Follow Bill at twitter.com/BillShanks and email him at thebillshanksshow@yahoo.com

This story was originally published November 29, 2015 at 4:30 PM with the headline "Bill Shanks: Georgia made the right decision ."