Charlie Harper: Grizzard's dead and Richt is out

At the beginning of the 1993 football season, Lewis Grizzard penned a column headlined "Us versus Them, gridiron style." In it he used a tale of his and a friend's attendance at the 1981 Sugar Bowl to explain the importance of college football to Southern fans.

His friend's wife, concerned how worked up he was getting, tried to tell him it was just a football game. The friend quickly exclaimed, "It's not just a football game. It's our way of life against theirs." Grizzard -- the patron saint of Georgia football and barbecue -- included that he once checked out of a London hospital with a heart infection and flew home for Georgia's 1985 season opener with Alabama because he "wasn't about to stay in no foreign country during college football season."

In looking at the upcoming season, he wrote: "Us could win them all in '93, by the way, or Us could lose a few. But, right or wrong, win or lose, always Us." That would end up being Grizzard's last season of UGA football. And to paraphrase him, Lewis Grizzard is dead and I don't feel so good myself.

On Sunday it was announced that the University of Georgia and Coach Mark Richt had "mutually agreed" to part ways. Richt was cursed with restoring goodness to UGA football during his 15-season tenure. His biggest sin was not capturing a moment of greatness. We have it on good authority that fans now have the right to expect this.

Richt, should he stick around and win this year's bowl game, will have completed his tenth ten-win season out of 15 years. His only losing season was 2010, when he finished 6-7 after losing the Liberty Bowl. You would have to look back to the 1894 single season of Robert Winston to find a UGA head coach with a higher winning percentage than Richt.

But we haven't won "the big one" since 1980, and others that live near us have -- some several times. And thus, Mark Richt will be traded in because we want our expectations to be consistently higher than anything our program has yet to achieve.

Of course, that's what Tennessee thought when they canned Phil Fulmer a decade after he won them a national championship. Three coaches later they're still waiting.

Auburn dumped Gene Chizik two seasons after winning it all. His replacement took the team to the BCS title game but lost the following season. He went 8-5 last year and is barely bowl eligible this year at 6-6.

Then there's Alabama and Nick Saban. Apparently the key to winning it all is to just go out and hire a Nick Saban. It took Alabama six coaching hires after Gene Stallings to get a Nick Saban -- and there's only one of him. One of those hires was so good that Mike Price had to be replaced before he coached a single game. Even Alabama's success rate in hiring the sure thing was less than 20% effective.

Regardless, the die has now been cast. Whoever we are as Georgia football, "Us" is going to have a new head coach. If there appears to be more angst surrounding this move than other programs switching out coaches, consider this: Alabama has had six head football coaches this millennium. Georgia has had six head coaches since the beginning of World War II.

We, or at least I, have had this argument before when Georgia decided to part ways with Ray Goff. My father, who attended UGA because of a football scholarship, was livid that "we let a good man go." I (who never played the game) argued that I wanted someone who could win. It took half a season for Dad to come around and become one of "Us" again.

Now the cleat is on the other foot. Mark Richt is a great man. His record says he's a pretty good coach. And those who are paid to make the decisions for all of Us have decided that it's time to take a different direction. With this action, they have fed the beast that is demanding even higher expectations. By doing so, they have put their own jobs on the line that the next coach can deliver the big win -- and soon.

Coach Richt served as an asset to UGA for a decade and a half. My biggest hope at this point is that a decade from now, we'll still recognize Us when we sit together in Sanford Stadium. Will we have fully ceded the sport to being the business it has become, or will there still be sentimental fabric that binds 92,000 strangers into friends on fall Saturdays?

Mark Richt showed us what a true role model a coach can be. His firing tells us a lot more about who We are. And who We are now appears to be a lot more demanding, yet a lot more superficial, than anything Mr. Grizzard ever experienced.

Charlie Harper, author and editor of the Peach Pundit blog, writes on Georgia politics and government; www.peachpundit.com.

This story was originally published December 1, 2015 at 3:39 PM with the headline "Charlie Harper: Grizzard's dead and Richt is out ."