TheDawgfather
Recruit
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2016
- Messages
- 29
Jon was an unpaid volunteer coach one season, but there was never a move or even a rumor that Richt wanted to hire Jon to an on-field coaching position. It would've been a non-starter anyway due to Georgia's anti-nepotism policies. These rules were bent in the past to allow Jim Donnan and Jim Harrick to hire their sons. Basically, UGA created "paper" positions for Todd Donnan and Jim Harrick, Jr. They split their time in a dual employment capacity between those paper positions and their coaching responsibilities. After the Harrick fiasco, no one will be willing to do that again. Besides, Jon had a quality control position with the Bills during Richt's last season in Athens. He didn't need a job right away or anything like that.
The Bama game was a debacle, no doubt. He could've survived that, though. What truly did him in was the Florida game.
We had struggled terribly on offense, beating Missouri 9-6 without scoring a touchdown. In a move of total desperation, Richt started a guy from y'all's neck of the woods: Faton Bauta. This article summarizes a lot of it, but it was a headscratcher, to say the least. Bauta, who had never been higher than 3rd on the depth chart, was more of a runner. When it leaked he was going to start, most assumed it meant a more power attack with some spread RPOs. It didn't. We saw the exact same offense we'd seen the week before with nothing at all tailored to Bauta's abilities. Worse, he left Bauta in to flail hopelessly for virtually the entire game. I've never felt so bad for a player. From early on, it was clear that Bauta didn't belong on the field. It was like those YouTube videos where the retarded waterboy gets put in and the other team lets him score, pretending to chase him. Except Florida didn't pretend, they destroyed him. Bauta finished with 4 interceptions and 0 touchdowns.
To the larger point about why UGA fired Richt. It became a meme, but Richt had lost control of the program. Not in the sense that the inmates were running the asylum, but that he had ceded so much control of the program to his assistants that it was no longer clear who was in charge. He had grown to heavily rely on Mike Bobo, who was OC from 2007 until 2014. When Bobo became head coach at Colorado State, it created a power vacuum. Jeremy Pruitt, brought in as DC the year before, filled it and then some.
Pruitt is an excellent coach, but he is the proverbial bull in a china shop. He didn't like Richt's laissez-faire approach and wasn't shy about voicing it. He absolutely dressed Richt down one day during practice, literally picking up the ball they were practicing with and walking off. Richt just stood there and took it. By that point, the staff was completely divided and Thomas Brown had to be physically restrained from attacking Pruitt. For their part, the players basically just said "F it and F the coaches. We'll play for us" and somehow won out after the Florida loss. The damage was done, though. The players had completely lost respect for Richt.
