Wednesday, Nov. 04, 2009

Richt, Bulldogs working hard to turn around season

ATHENS — Mark Richt is a nice guy.

That is a reputation that has dogged him since the day he was hired at Georgia, when his former boss Bobby Bowden wondered if Richt had the stomach for some of the tough decisions that accompanied being the head coach of a big-time college football program. Now eight games into the most tumultuous season of his career, that old nice-guy reputation is haunting Richt again, with fans asking whether their head coach with the heart of gold is capable of making changes that might not be particularly pleasant for him to address.

There’s usually nothing wrong with being a nice guy, but with a 4-4 record and the future of his program coming into question, Richt said there’s another side to his personality that most fans don’t see.

“People that know me well or the team or the coaches, they know that I’ve got another edge to me that I don’t show publicly all the time,” Richt said. “Maybe that’s what the public wants to see, but if you are going to be accused of something, being accused of being a nice guy is not one of the worse things to be accused of.”

Richt’s players think he’s a nice guy, too, but they aren’t questioning his willingness to ruffle a few feathers. While Georgia’s head coach may play the role of affable father figure in front of the cameras, the Bulldogs have seen what happens when problems arise behind closed doors.

“He’s a great coach, a great family man, but you know you don’t want to get on his bad side,” linebacker Rennie Curran said. “When you’re not getting the job done, not executing, he’s going to let you know.”

Sophomore Marcus Dowtin won’t argue with anyone who calls Richt mild-mannered. In fact, Dowtin has rarely heard his head coach yell. But that doesn’t mean Richt doesn’t have his attention when there’s a serious matter to be discussed.

“When he is serious, everybody knows it,” Dowtin said. “He doesn’t have to raise his voice for everybody to know that he’s serious.”

Still, concerns persist. After all, Richt has never coached a team that has struggled as much as Georgia has this season. As an assistant at Florida State, his teams were routinely ranked in the top five nationally. He lost four games his first season at Georgia, but fans widely recognized he had the program pointed in the right direction. In 2006, his team struggled through a rough stretch of four losses in five games, but freshman quarterback Matthew Stafford showed signs of improvement, and fans again believed the future was bright. This season, however, has been different.

“The only thing I could refer back to is 2006 because there haven’t been many seasons that I’ve lived through that would even resemble this one,” Richt said.

Richt hasn’t extended an olive branch to many of the most concerned fans this season either.