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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYSJuly 23, 2009Mark RichtHOOVER, ALABAMA THE MODERATOR: We're ready to begin with Georgia head Coach Mark Richt. COACH RICHT: Thank you. Good to see everybody here today. I guess it's here, the season is here. We're here in Birmingham getting ready to go. People want to talk a lot about what my expectation is of this team. I think the greatest expectation I have for this team is that we understand how important it is to, you know, put the work in and to work together and to realize that it takes a whole lot more than just two stars that everybody felt like were gonna make the difference last year. With Knowshon Moreno, everybody expected us to win 'em all because we had these two guys that everybody considered stars, and maybe subconsciously our guys thought, We can count on these guys. Now that they're gone, I think our team understands the only chance they have is to play together, work together, earn it as a team. I think they've done a great job of buying into that, preparing throughout this off-season for that type of season. So I'm excited. Year nine. I'm amazed I'm still here (smiling). It's a very volatile business and volatile league. But I'm very blessed to be at Georgia. Looking forward to other great season. THE MODERATOR: Questions. Q. Can you talk about Joe Cox, what you expect to get out of him this year? COACH RICHT: Well, when it comes to quarterback play, in my opinion, you need to have an accurate passer, you need to have a great decision-maker, you need to have a young man who can handle the pressure of the job, because there's a lot of pressure that comes with that job, and you need a guy who can lead. And Joe really personifies all those characteristics. We have exit meetings in the spring. We talk to our players after spring ball. One of the things we ask 'em, besides talking about their strengths and weaknesses, what their goals are, all that kind of thing, we ask them, Who are the leaders on this football team, in your opinion? Who are the leaders? I think it was, like, 106 out of 110 guys that did their exit meetings said Joe Cox. I think that's significant. He was the No. 1 vote-getter, if you want to call them votes. For a guy who hasn't started but one game his entire career, that was about two or three years ago, I think that says a lot about what the guys think about Joe and what Joe has done in preparation for this moment. I don't think there's any player on this team that doesn't believe that Joe was ready last season. And the year before, if something were to happen to Matt, they knew Joe was ready to go. They believe in Joe right now, as the staff does, and I do certainly. Q. Can you tell me who did you vote for, for all SEC quarterback? COACH RICHT: I can. It was Tim Tebow. I think that's what everybody else said so far (smiling). Q. So far. COACH RICHT: Yeah. Q. What do you make of all this Tim Tebow? Every coach is being asked about that. Is it a big deal that he wasn't a unanimous pick? COACH RICHT: Well, first of all, I think the ballots are private for a reason. But everybody wants to know what everybody thinks. I think everybody has a right to their own opinion. I remember a few years ago, I don't remember what year it was, but it was Cutler's senior year, whatever year that was. I mean, I voted Cutler first team, all-SEC. I forgot who else was around at the time, but there were a couple pretty prominent names. He wasn't the popular choice, but as I studied that kid, I thought he was the best. There's different reasons why a coach will vote one way or another. It would be very difficult to not vote Tim. But I guess somebody did. Maybe there was a mistake in the calculation. I don't know. Maybe there was a typo (smiling). Q. I'm wondering if you have spoken with Houston Nutt about pre-season expectations? COACH RICHT: No, I haven't. I know Houston pretty well. Enjoy his company a lot. He's a lot of fun to be around. Very sharp guy and great coach. But we didn't get into that. When we get to Destin, we talk about family, we talk about how are things going, how is your off-season. Every once in a while, we'll talk about issues like that, but we didn't get into that. Q. You have a bit of a background in the state of Florida. Florida won two of the last three national titles. Miami and Florida State had their runs a few years ago. What is it about that state? Is it just the recruiting base? COACH RICHT: I mean, that's a big part of it, there's no doubt. There's a bunch of tremendous athletes in the state of Florida, a lot of speed there. Then you've had coaches that have taken advantage of the speed and the talent base, parlayed that into an outstanding, cohesive unit, good enough to win a national championship. The other thing is, I guess at one time, Miami was in the Big East, Florida State was in the ACC, Florida in the SEC. So you've got -- if all those schools were in the same conference, I doubt you would have had that much success. They were able to, at times, dominate their leagues because they were all in different leagues, and one of those three had a very good chance of making it to the national championship game. I was at Florida State for I think 14 or 15 years, one of the those two, I can't remember. But it just seemed like for a time there, the winner of the Miami/Florida State game, one of those two was going to play for the national championship because both teams were gonna -- they were winning their respective leagues, that were allowing you to get a chance to play in that game. I think that has something to do with it, too. Q. The contract on having the Florida/Georgia game in Jacksonville is about to run out. Do you want to see it moved, stay there, and why? COACH RICHT: This is what I want to do. I want to focus on winning that game. That's all I want to focus on when it comes to that game. Q. You don't care where it's played? COACH RICHT: I really just want to focus on trying to win that game. That's my goal from here on in (smiling). That will be my pat answer from here on in. Q. Your defense gave up some significant points in big games last year. Could you talk to us about how you and your staff have tried to address those issues heading into 2009? COACH RICHT: Number one, we hope to stay healthy. Number two, we hope to practice the way we've practiced every year since I've been at Georgia, and that is to practice tackling by tackling, and to practice goal line by getting on the goal line, practice inside run by getting after it full speed, full contact. What we did last year, at my direction and my decision was to -- we backed off of some of those practice sessions in full pads with the intention of playing full speed as far as tackling to the ground, cutting below the waist, just playing football, because we got to the point where we were so thin at some positions, if we lost one more guy, we were gonna be in trouble with just having a guy that would know what to do. And so our injuries came fairly fast and furious. I mean, like, for example, we normally have three scrimmages in the pre-season to try to determine who the starters should be, the backup should be, but also to hone our skills at playing football and tackling, playing with speed and energy and intimidation on defense. By our scrimmage number two last year, I made the decision to thud that practice rather than go full speed. As soon as it was over, I knew I made a mistake because you don't get good at defense by doing that. So the next day, we did scrimmage some, not nearly as much as we would have the day before. I was trying to at least get us back into that mode. But things like that happen throughout the year because of the number of guys that were banged up. I hope I'm not put in that situation again to have to make that decision, but if I don't flinch, we're gonna keep practicing the way you got to practice playing defense. Hopefully, we learned a good lesson there. Q. Will you be having the blackout again this year? COACH RICHT: We may wear black jerseys again this year. I don't know. That was kind of a Bulldog club question. Seemed like every time I went to the Bulldog club, they wanted to know. The one thing about the blackout is that the fans don't buy into it, it's no good. You can wear black jerseys, any jersey you want. If you're going to say, We're going to ask the fans to all wear black, they have to have a spirit of cooperation. After what happened at Alabama last year, I'm not sure everybody would wear black. I'm not sure if we'll do it or not. We've got the ability to do it. We have jerseys to do that. Q. Last season you had a lot of off-the-field problems. This season you haven't had any. What has been the difference? Have you made any changes in terms of talking to your athletes about avoiding situations that might get them in trouble? COACH RICHT: There's really been no difference in our coaching staff's pursuit of educating our guys about those types of things. I think when it comes to that, that has to be player-led. I did spend a lot of time speaking to our seniors. We have a character education class. We meet once a week for half an hour and talk about leadership. We sometimes get off of our curriculum and we'll just talk about the team, how we can practically lead the team. We talked about some of the things that happened last season. One of the things the seniors came up with is they felt like there wasn't enough accountability, you know, player to player. One guy didn't have enough accountability to his teammate in how he handled his business in a lot of ways, whether it was schoolwork, how hard he worked, what he did off the field. So they felt like they needed to be accountable to each other much more than they ever have. I think that Joe Cox, Jeffrey Owens, the two that are here today, and others, have done a very good job of relaying that to their teammates. I just think they see the value in that. I think there's a lot of players that got sick of it themselves. They didn't want it to happen again. Q. A lot of people seem to be penciling in the Gators for this undefeated season. How much of a motivating factor is that for you guys? COACH RICHT: I think we're always motivated to win the East, period. You know, I don't know if it matters who's pre-season number one or the pre-season choice. I'll bet it's 50/50 at best at everybody picking the right now. If took the last 10 years, they might have been right half the time, wrong half the time. We absolutely just have to focus on ourselves and what we need to do to prepare. The closer you get to the season, the more your focus begins to hone in on your opponents. Right now the only team we're thinking much about is Oklahoma State. But we absolutely had the goal of winning the Eastern Division, no doubt about that. Q. Could you talk about your non-conference schedule. Looks pretty tough. Pretty major increase in assistant's salaries, especially at Tennessee. What do you think about that trend? COACH RICHT: Yeah, non-conference, to have three BCS conference opponents out of the four non-conference games is pretty heavy-duty. Then when you look at who they are, you know, Oklahoma State, probably pre-season top 10 by most people, loaded offense coming back, a team that you hear the coaches say, We've been kind of pointing to this season for the last couple years, opening a brand-new stadium. I think they're charging $100 a ticket. I think it's the highest pre-season start for Oklahoma State. So they're gonna be off the chart when it comes to enthusiasm and excitement and expectations towards their season. Then you also have Arizona State. Another BCS opponent. Dennis Erickson has won a couple of national championships, at least one. Did he win one or two? He won two, didn't he, at Miami? Then of course, Georgia Tech, we've all seen what they've been able to do under Paul Johnson's direction. That's pretty tough when you consider who you play in conference. We might have bit off more than we should have. I think the plan was never to have three BCS opponents. We did say, after the 12th game was added, we would add -- try to add a BCS opponent outside of the Southeast Region. We decided to do that. Just because of the scheduling, it so happened the only way it would work, with some home and aways with Arizona State and Oklahoma State, it had to happen all in this year. But I doubt that happens again anytime soon. Then the second one was salaries. Assistant coach's salaries, yeah, they're going up. It is difficult sometimes to keep your staff, keep your entire staff because of the amount of money out there. The thing about our staff at Georgia is we have a bunch of fine coaches, a bunch of veteran coaches. If you want to pay all these guys well because of their experience, because of their competence -- I mean, our pool of money is more evenly distributed than some. Some may have extremely high on the coordinator end or whatever it might be, then might be very, very low at another end of the spectrum. Everybody kind of has a pool of money. Some school's pool is a little bit bigger than others. The goal I think is to create an atmosphere where your coaches enjoy coming to work, where you allow them to have a job, a responsibility, and you give them the authority to carry it out. I think if you micromanage good people, they tend to get a little bored with that, frustrated with that. They tend to move somewhere where they can grow and shine. I try to allow these guys to try to do that here at Georgia. Plus we try to create a really wonderful family atmosphere, too, which I know they enjoy. Q. Could you give us some basic things you like about your team overall, a couple areas of concern. COACH RICHT: Overall, I like defensively the fact that we're gonna be hungry, maybe hungrier than we've been in a long time. I like the fact that we have -- we're pretty stout up the gut. You take Jeffrey Owens and Geno Atkins, Kade Weston, DeAngelo Tyson, Brandon Wheeling, a walk-on who we have high hopes for who is going to be a fifth-year senior, the interior defensive line, Rennie Curran, Akeem Dent, linebackers right up the gut. You talk Reshad Jones, Bryan Evans at safety. That's strong up-the-middle. You need that. We need pressure off the edge. We need guys that can cover people outside. If you're weak in the middle, you got problems. I'm not disappointed by any stretch about our corner play or anything like that. I'm confident in them. Defensive ends, I feel like they're hungry. They feel like they've got something to prove. Historically, since I've been at Georgia, our defensive end position has been highly productive. We've had many first and second team all-SEC performers. We've had guys lead the league in sacks. Last year we fell short of what was normal for us. I like the fact we're not going to be starting three freshmen linemen like we have the last two seasons on offense. It just dawned on me, I think we only have three seniors on offense. Joe Cox and Vince Vance and Michael Moore. I didn't realize that. But we do have a lot of guys returning that have played a lot of ball for us. So that's a good thing for us. I have a lot of confidence in Blair Walsh's ability to kick extra-point field goals. I know we'll be much improved in the kickoff. Butler is unproven as a punter. Butler has proved to me he can punt well enough to be outstanding in our league, just by observing him, but he hasn't proved that he can be consistent enough. So I guess what I'm saying is maybe last year he's five or six out of 10 that were outstanding. We got to get him to where he's nine out of 10, 10 out of 10, which he's been working diligently to be that. When guys get their chance, they usually rise to their occasion, if they're a competitor, which I know Drew is. Q. You talked about the expectations on your team going into last season. Florida has that this year. What is the best way to handle that? COACH RICHT: I don't know (laughter). I think you just got to try to focus again on what's gonna help you win, you know. Your mind has to be focused on the process of getting prepared, the off-season conditioning, behaving, the belief in how important the team is, and then getting into camp and focusing on your fundamentals. It's really pretty simple. You just got to stay focused on the things that will help you win and try to avoid all the other stuff, which is very difficult to do, 'cause there's a constant barrage of people wanting to talk about it. Q. Can you talk about the depth in the secondary, maybe how the runningbacks did this spring. COACH RICHT: Our secondary, I mentioned the two safeties, Reshad Jones and Bryan Evans. Got a lot of confidence in those young men. We help Quintin Banks can get back. He's been hurt. He's another guy we know we can count on if he's healthy. He's had a knee injury that he's doing pretty well rehabbing, but there will be a day or two where it swells up on him and slows him down a little bit. But we've got confidence in his abilities. Bacarri Rambo is a guy playing safety, Makiri Pugh, some young guys that we know can do it. Sanders Commings can play safety or boundary corner. As far as our starters at the boundary, with the starter at the boundary corner will be Brandon Boykin, a young man who will be a true sophomore. Very explosive. Losing Asher Allen was not a good thing for us, but Brandon is an outstanding player and his work ethic is very much like Asher. He's a very, very serious competitor. Prince Miller out at the wide corner will be our starter, a senior for us who we have a lot of confidence in. Vance Cuff can play the field. We're going to give Branden Smith an opportunity, a true freshman, to see what he can do. That kind of gives you a pretty good run down of who we have in the perimeter. Q. Runningbacks? COACH RICHT: Runningbacks, I was just mentioning earlier, I think we could probably -- I could probably blindly grab two or three of 'em, just pick 'em up, and I would have confidence whatever three I picked out, we will have success with them. Sometimes when you say no one has separated themselves from the pack, sometimes that's bad if your pack isn't very good. But if you got a pack of good ones, you know, it's hard to separate also because you have some talented guys around you. I think it's more a situation of that than not having anybody outstanding. I think they're all pretty outstanding. The whole thing is going to be who gets it done when it counts the most. We have 29 practice opportunities to see who it is. If it's one guy carrying the load, the majority of the load, I'm fine with that. If it's three guys sharing it, I'm okay with that, too. But we're gonna run the ball. Q. You obviously have a couple young quarterbacks that are pretty talented. Do you plan on trying to get them in, have packages for them, and also how you push away the most popular player on the team as the backup quarterback, push that away from the fans? COACH RICHT: Right, well, Zach Mettenberger, Aaron Murray are our two true freshman quarterbacks. I'm assuming you're talking about them. Are you throwing Logan Gray in the mix, too? They're sitting there trying to win that job. When it comes to the true freshmen, if I feel one is the true second team quarterback, we will play him, get him as much experience as we can. If Logan Gray is our number two guy, we may choose to redshirt both of those true freshmen. If Logan Gray is not the number two quarterback, we may still have a package for him separate from our overall package just because he is athletic enough to do those kind of things that people do in the wildcat, whatever you want to call it. So you got a wildcat who can actually throw and understand the entire system. That's not a bad thing. We'll just see how these guys develop. I think the fans, until your starter wins over the fans, they'll always be crying for somebody else. Hopefully they'll be applauding Joe rather than want to have someone else play. Q. You're playing in Fayetteville for the first time in a few years. What were your impressions of Bobby Petrino when you were in the same neighborhood? COACH RICHT: Well, Coach Petrino's history has been very, very successful. You're going to have to have some success to get a job in the Southeastern Conference, that's for sure. You know, what he did at Louisville was really phenomenal. Since he's been gone, they've struggled mightily. It's probably not a coincidence that it had to do with him arriving and leaving. He knows what he's doing. He absolutely is a great quarterback developer, and he has a scheme that will allow that quarterback to have a chance to be great. He knows it takes defense and special teams to win also. I mean, he's just an outstanding coach. He's like all of us, trying to prove we're the best in any given year, so... I'll say this, too. If you look at the history, recent history anyway, of Southeastern Conference coaches, and coaches I think around the country, there's been a lot of instances where their second season they kind of broke out. That's where he's at. So that makes me a little concerned, too, that he's now had a whole year to go through all the debugging of things, and now everybody is on the same page and ready to roll. Q. Earlier you mentioned going into your 9th year. That makes you the dean of SEC coaches in terms of longest tenure at your current school. Do you realize that? COACH RICHT: When I said I was surprised I'm here, it wasn't so much because of any recent season or anything like that. I think I was reflecting back on being here for the first time nine years ago, and to think that you are going to be here nine years later in our league, in college football in general, the same team, the way things are going, you can't sit there and start predicting that that would happen. You know, every decision I ever made since I've been at Georgia has been to try to make a decision that would help us in the long run. I didn't try to do anything in a quick-fix fashion. I was used to working for a man, named Bobby Bowden, he had so much success at one place, you know, that was attractive to me. I wanted to provide that same kind of stability for our players and our program and our staff and their wives and children, as Coach Bowden did for me and my family. So everything I've done is to try to make sure we will be here for the long haul. But it's humbling, no doubt. I don't know what that means other than we're doing a little something right here. THE MODERATOR: Coach Richt, thank you. COACH RICHT: All right. Enjoyed it. End of FastScripts |
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