Mark Richt resurrected a Georgia football program that had fallen on hard times. College football will be much poorer for his absence.
It’s sad that this fairytale won’t have a happy ending. When Mark Richt left Georgia in 2015 and landed at his alma mater in Miami, I, like many Dawg fans was ecstatic for him. Richt’s time at Georgia had gotten stale and his time had come, but I still saw him as a good coach and a great molder of young men. With a Miami program that was down in the dumps much like Georgia was in 2000, it seemed like the perfect hire.
Three years later, Richt will leave Miami as just another coach who couldn’t help the Hurricanes turn it around. In those three years, he had one purple patch, a 10 game win streak last season when his team actually looked good. But other than that, Richt’s Miami looked a lot like Al Golden’s and Randy Shannon’s Miami. Decent but not good enough to compete in the ACC. Considering how weak that conference is other than Clemson, that says pretty much all you need you know about how far the Hurricanes have fallen since entering the ACC.
Richt’s departure from college football is being greeted by some glee in certain areas of the UGA and Miami fanbase. I’m not one of those people. I know how flawed of a coach Richt was, particularly in his final few years at Georgia. He consistently ignored the offensive line when it came to recruiting and he never maximized the talent he had at his disposal. That being said, college football will be poorer for his absesnse. There really are not many coaches like him left in a sport that has become increasingly obsessed with winning.
In a lot of ways, UGA and Miami fans didn’t really deserve Mark Richt. Our desire to see our team win isn’t any greater than 100 other fanbases out there but our schools do have responsibilities to the young men that are a part of the football program. There are very few, if any, men out there that can live up to those responsibilities better than Richt. He was a good (not great) coach, but nobody can dispute that he’s a great man who cared deeply and prioritized people over winning.
Unfortunately, those values don’t match today’s CFB landscape. Winning is really all that matters, not character, not decency and not how much a coach cares about his players. If literally, anything else meant a damn, Urban Meyer would have spent the 2018 season watching his Ohio State team from a TV booth rather than coaching on the sidelines. But OSU fans had little interest in those factors and instead had one thing on their mind. A national championship.
They aren’t alone. Ninety-nine percent of college football fans would ignore pretty much any NCAA violation, misdemeanor and a whole lot of felonies if it meant watching their team win the final game of the year. Lots of Georgia fans like myself love Kirby Smart and the culture that he’s building in Athens, but let’s be honest with ourselves, we’d sell our own damn grandmothers to see the Dawgs break a nearly 40-year drought. We certainly don’t care about Kirby being a decent human being, we want him to win.
When you acknowledge that this is where college football is right now, Richt’s decision to retire isn’t particularly surprising. The day’s of this sport and it’s fans cherrising a guy who does everything right off the field while making mistakes on it are long gone. When you think about it, that’s sad, because Richt left Georgia and college football in a much better place than it was when he first became a head coach. He changed thousands of lives and despite no longer being a coach, I doubt he’s done helping others.
Despite his failings on the field, Richt will go down in history as one of the best coaches Georgia ever had. He turned around a beaten-down program and gave this University pride again. UGA became a better school because of his efforts and he was doing something similar at Miami despite the issues his team faced on the field. There just aren’t many guys out there like Richt and college football will miss him.