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UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 6, 2015Mark RichtAthens, Georgia An Interview With: COACH MARK RICHT COACH MARK RICHT: Sorry about that everybody. I got a little carried away talking recruiting with the coach. My bad, as they say. All right. Here we go. Hitting the road going to Knoxville. Tremendous atmosphere we all know and a really, really fan football team that coach Jones has put together, him and his staff. I'll be talking a little bit about offense to begin with. They've got six returning starters. Every one of their linemen weigh over 300 pounds. Big men. They're rushing the ball extremely well. 225 yards a game. I think they're third or fourth in the league in that category, doing a great job with that. Averaging 37 points a game, 417 yards a game rushing -- excuse me, total yardage. 192 yards a game passing. And they're second in the league in the fewest turnovers given. Doing a good job of protecting the football. Not many picks and not many fumbles. I think there's only a total of three, which is really outstanding for this time of the year. As far as their quarterback, Dobbs, really dynamic player. 789 yards passing, 339 yards rushing. He's accounted for five TDs passing and only thrown one pick. But a dynamic receiver as well. He's got a receiving touchdown, very versatile athlete and great quarterback. Going to give us a great challenge to try to hem him up. As far as running the ball, Hurd has got 492 yards, averaging 98 yards a game, seven TDs already. Kamara behind him; he's got 247 yards. He's averaging 6.7 yards a carry, very athletic guy. Three TDs for him. Also he's got 10 catches, No. 3 receiver as far as number of catches as well, so very, very diverse, versatile player. A lot like Sony Michel in regard to that versatility. They've got two guys with 12 catches, Malone, No. 3, at playing receiver and Wolf, No. 82 playing tight end, both got 12 catches. Wolf's got 157 yards and two TDs, and Malone has got 109 yards with a touchdown, and so they do a good job of running routes and catching the ball. They also have Jennings has got nine catches, doing a great job there as well. So just a great attack, very balanced in what they're doing, and when you watch them, you know they're getting coached extremely well. On defense they're giving up 24 points a game, 171 yards a game rushing, 242 yards a game passing, for a total of 414 yards a game. They do have six returning starters as well. When you talk about them up front, Derek Barnett, No. 9 has got 25 tackles, two-and-a-half tackles for loss, a sack, two pass breakups, three quarterback hurries, fumble recovery, very, very active guy up front, doing a great job, very long, athletic job, about 6-3, 260, doing a great job. And then the thing about their D line, they do rotate a lot. They've got some young players in there over 300 pounds apiece, Tuttle and McKenzie, backing up Williams and Vickers. But they do, they rotate a lot. They play a lot of people, try to keep them fresh and do a nice job in that regard. And in the linebacker core, the No. 1 tackler on the team is Jalen Reeves-Maybin, No. 21. He was number 34 last year. Outstanding player; 51 tackles already, eight tackles for loss, three sacks, four pass breakups, a quarterback hurry, force fumble, a fumble recovery. Against Oklahoma he had 21 tackles. That's pretty impressive day's work. In the perimeter, Brian Randolph is their veteran back there. He's a senior. He's got 25 tackles back in the perimeter. Their safeties get involved quite a bit in the run game. They're the guys that in a lot of their schemes, they're trying to funnel the ball to that free hitter, a guy that usually doesn't have anybody blocking them, unless you can get a receiver on them. But he does a really good job there. He's got two interceptions as well, Randolph does. And another guy back there, McNeil, has got two picks as well. So -- no, excuse me, Todd Kelly, Jr. has two interceptions. That was my bad on that. He's been playing a good bit as well. Cameron Sutton playing corner has 16 tackles, a couple, four pass breakups, a forced fumble, two tackles for loss. They do, you know, bring some corner blitzes, and these guys get involved in running down the run game and supporting the run and also trying to sack the quarterback on some of their blitzes. But he's also a punt return man for them. He's averaging 15 yards a return. And while I'm talking about special teams, statistically by far, they're the best team we've played so far, and when you watch the film, you can see why. They're No. 1 in the nation in kickoff return yardage. They are No. 3 in the nation in punting average and in net punt they're sixth nationally. So they're doing a wonderful job in that regard. In their punt return they're fourth in the southeastern conference, 25th in the nation. So doing a wonderful job there. Their punter, Daniel, averaging 48 yards a punt. I think he's like third in America in that category. Their kicker, Medley, he knocks it out of the end zone quite a bit; 15 touchbacks already. He's hit 61 percent of his field goals, 8 of 13, long of 45. Mentioned Sutton as a punt return man, but Kamara, No. 6, is averaging 16.8, but he doesn't have quite as many returns as Sutton on the punt return. And they've had a touchdown -- punt returned for a touchdown and two other touchdowns called back. So when you watch the film and you see three punt returns go for a touchdown, you know they're really good at what they do. And then kickoff return, Berry is averaging 40 yards per return with two touchdowns already on kickoff return. So just dynamic return people, and they block extremely well. So you know, definitely got our work cut out for us. I thought we had a good start yesterday. You know, once we buried the last one and started moving forward, I think that's good medicine for everybody. And you know, when you start putting the work in and there's certain deadlines you gotta meet, you just start focusing on the next game, and that's exactly what we've done. So we're ready to move forward. So with that I'll open it up and see what everybody's got. Q. I wanted to ask you more about Dobbs, a Georgia kid. COACH MARK RICHT: Right. Q. This is his third year to start, but the past two years he became the starter after Georgia had played him. So I was just kind of curious how much -- did you all have to scout him each of the last two years and just kind of wondering what you thought of his running ability. COACH MARK RICHT: Right. He is very good. And even this year he's been even -- he's been more dynamic in my opinion. You know, he's bigger, stronger, faster. Guys get stronger as they go. They get in better condition as they go. And he's got a very good grasp of what they're trying to do offensively. If you judge him just as a passer he's really outstanding. If you judge him just as an athletic quarterback, he's a threat. But when you put it all together, you've got one of the greatest dual-threat quarterbacks in our league; and he's got confidence. He's got games under his belt, a bunch of big games under his belt. So I'm sure playing at home will be good for him as well. Q. (No microphone)? COACH MARK RICHT: Yeah. I guess so because we play -- I guess this is about the time of year we play them every year. But it'll be interesting. He's a guy that definitely has our attention. Q. Coach, you guys had a couple of cracks at Alvin Kamara in the recruiting process? COACH MARK RICHT: Right. Q. What did you guys see out of him and how much did you want him? COACH MARK RICHT: Oh, yeah. We wanted him. He's a very talented guy, got good speed, good agility, great ball skills. We thought he could be a return man, just what he's doing. We thought he could be -- we thought he could play running back or receiver. But figured he'd be a running back who would, you know, get out there and do some receiver things, very similar to what we do with Sony. You know, he'd come to the summer camps, the 7 on 7 camps that we have and just kind of watch him do his thing within the system that he was running in high school. You could see him do everything that you'd ever ask a running back or a receiver to do, for that matter. He was that dynamically taught. Q. Coach, in most of the seasons you guys have had to reach the SEC championship game, had big seasons, played in big bowls. When you've had kind of a lopsided defeat like you had this past Saturday, is there -- I don't know, what's the benefit or -- COACH MARK RICHT: Right. Yeah. Q. Do you learn or what do you take from it? COACH MARK RICHT: Well, I think that the good news is it only counted as one loss, you know. I mean that was enough of a game where it could have counted as two. But it was one loss. And so that's good. And when you get beat that way, it certainly gets everybody's attention. I think any loss does. Sometimes if you lose a game at the last second, that may be more gut-wrenching than just getting whipped. Sometimes you get whipped and you know what, we got whipped. Let's go make the corrections that need to be made and let's forget about it and move on. And but I mean I don't even know what the deal -- I mean how many SEC teams have won the league undefeated in the last 10 years. I mean that would be a good stat to check out. Not many. Not many. It's just hard to go undefeated in our league, for sure. But you know, our big thing is to grow from it. You know, it's not a total loss if you learn from it. And that's true in all losses. So we do feel like we put it behind us. We feel like we've made the corrections we need to make and we're moving forward and hopefully be better because of the changes or the feeling that you just don't want to feel again. Hopefully that'll help us, too. Q. Coach, (No microphone). COACH MARK RICHT: Yeah. Well, some of it was they're just pretty dadgum good. I mean they're waive or give of the better teams in America. I mean y'all -- I don't know how close you got to those guys, but they're pretty big men, you know. There was a size advantage for them. And it's to their credit to recruit and develop like they have. But you know, you throw a pick 6. You get a punt block for a touchdown. You know, huge momentum-changing plays where you, you know, they were truly unforced errors. We just made a mistake on the punt -- on the punt block. If everybody would have done their job, we'd have punted down there and played defense. Now, they might have scored anyway. You know, who knows. But when it's just one play like that, bam, you know, it does something to the spirit of your team, does something to the spirit of your fans as well. And then the pick 6 was a mental error. And I don't want to throw guys under the bus, but we just had some young guys make a mistake that you hope they tend to make in practice as they're developing and getting ready for their time. But sometimes you end up playing young guys for a lot of different reasons. And these guys are very good players, and we love them, you know, but they -- we made two huge mistakes that caused 14 points like that. Now, the rest of the game, you take those out, do they still beat us? They probably do on that day. But you never know what happens if you don't encourage them a little bit. Q. Coach, past experience, when you come off of a performance like that, is it key to be kind of less is more in terms of addressing it with the team or do you address it as much as you can? COACH MARK RICHT: No. You hammer what you need to hammer. You correct what you need to correct. You say, men, this is not going to be real pleasant. You know, we're not going to just beat people down, but we gotta look at it and look in the mirror, and it's not pleasant for us as coaches. It's not pleasant for them as players to see some of the things that happened. But you gotta go through that process. That's what we do. The jobs that we have and the game we play is viewed by millions of people, so you get a lot of people watching our business, but -- and they may be critical, which I don't blame people for being critical of what happened on Saturday. I don't at all. I love the passion of our fans that they care enough, you know. I really do. But we're more critical than they are as far as when you look yourself in the mirror and say, you know, we didn't get the job done, and we gotta get better. And it's just -- it's nice to know you got another game coming, but sometimes you wish you were coaching baseball where you can play the next day and maybe have a good performance and move on a little faster. Q. Coach, you mentioned Tennessee's kickoff return. Conversely, Georgia's kickoff returns have not been that good this year, I think averaging 14 yards a return. Is that something you're concerned about right now? COACH MARK RICHT: Right. No, well, here's the thing on our kickoff return, if you -- prior to this game, if you notice, there's a bunch of bloop kicks. I mean a lot of them. And you're not going to get very many yards on the return. You get a bloop. Sometimes you fair catch it at the 32-yard line. Sometimes you catch it and get six tough yards with the guy as more of a blocker or whatever it is, you know. So I mean our -- if you went statistically on our average start what yard line we started on, we're really in a lot better shape than the amount of yards per return, if that makes sense. Now, this last game, they kicked it deep to us, and I know we got between the 20 and 25 probably every time but one we ended up being short of the 20, which is not good. So we didn't have a banner day as far as yards per kick in this particular game. But it's a little bit of misleading statistic when a lot of the kicks that were kicked to us have been bloop kicks, and the field position has been, you know, better than 25 yard line more times than not when they were blooping it to us. But it doesn't show up in your average. But to answer your question, we gotta get better there. Definitely gotta get better there as well. Q. Coach, kind of following up a little bit with some special teams, the punting game with Collin, how is that, and what the plans would be if McKenzie can't go? COACH MARK RICHT: Yeah. Well, the big thing in the -- here's the deal in punt. You gotta protect first. Okay. Like we did not protect. Obviously. That's priority one. Okay. Once you protect, you know, you have the punter -- well, you gotta get the snap, obviously your operation has gotta be good, the snap, the catch and the punt. Well, that punter, everybody across America is hoping that this guy can get the ball -- if you kick it 40 yards, you want a minimum of a four-point hang time. Okay. So you want at least, you know, a second per 10 yards to let your coverage team get down there. So if you kick it 55 yards and it's only a 4.2 hang time, you have out kicked your coverage. Your people say you out kicked your coverage. You kicked it too far, guys are trying to cover and now all you've done is create space for some of the best athletes in America to return the punt. So I don't get all that jacked up about a 55-yard punt if it's a low line drive. It just doesn't fire me up. So you know, we want the height to match up with the yardage. And then we want the direction to be correct, because people -- even if punt protection, sometimes you're protecting a certain way and you want the ball to be kicked this way. You're protecting another way, you want the ball to be kicked in another direction. So if you kick the ball in the direction you're supposed to kick it and your cover guys know that's the area of the field I'm covering, you got a much better chance. But if you're supposed to kick it to the right and everybody's thinking coverage wise that's the third of the field we're trying to cover and it sprays off there mid field to the left, you got a heck of a deal trying to get everybody to get in position to make the play. I don't think anybody can kick it down the middle and have their entire punt team cover the entire field. You just can't do it well. So to answer your question, Collin needs to have height that matches the distance and he's gotta get the direction correct, along with catching it and just, you know, the operation of catching it and getting it off. And then as far as McKenzie, if he's not there, we've been working 81, Davis. We've been working Godwin. I mean they're the top two. Dominick Sanders is a guy we really trust fielding the ball. They'd be the top guys. Briscoe is a guy we've been working and all. But you know, I doubt we get to the fourth guy. But I think he'd probably be that. Q. Coach, when you look back at, you know, the game was 10-3, five minutes left, almost trying to get to the locker room. When you feel it getting out of hand, like the momentum pushing, do you ever like think about taking, like in basketball, when a team goes on a 14-0 run, the coach might call a timeout just to stop it. Do you ever consider something like that, because you know, it was obvious? COACH MARK RICHT: Call timeout, say, hey, we're getting our butts kicked, what are we going to do now. Q. Yeah, because it was obvious it was coming? COACH MARK RICHT: Well, I'll say this. When you get a punt blocked and they score and then it goes to TV time and there's a five-minute time out, that's a long timeout. You know, so it's a little different than basketball where it's constantly in motion. But there's so many timeouts. I mean in a CBS game, I think it's four per quarter and then four floaters, in each half or something like that. Q. I guess what I'm asking is when you feel the momentum completely going the other direction, what can you do? COACH MARK RICHT: Well, I think what you do is you keep coaching and you keep -- I mean each -- every man has got a responsibility, whether it's offensive coordinator got his group and defensive coordinator has got his group and the position coaches got their guys, you know, and the offensive line coach has got his boys rallied up. So everybody is looking in the eyes of their players and saying, hey, you know, it hadn't gone well, but you know, if you just -- if you do your job and we make a play, the momentum can swing back. And like I was saying after the game, we didn't really have any -- we didn't have a counterpunch, you know. You gotta have a counterpunch to get things back in line and get back into a true competition. And it just didn't happen. Even the touchdown we scored, you know, there was a little energy, a little life that that happened. And then we kick it to them and it was really wet and nasty, and we weren't trying to place it where it would land on the grass, but as it turned out, it landed on the grass. And you know, if we'd have got on that one, you know, now we're maybe inside the 20 and then all of a sudden momentum swings in our way. But it just didn't happen. And you know, a lot of it is attributed to how they played. And then of course, you always have halftime to start to regroup. So we go to halftime. We got our plan and everything's, you know, we start out with that pick 6, you know, again. And it was like, you know, why did that -- why did that happen. Why did that -- you know, but it was a young kid just doing what freshmen do sometimes. Q. Obviously there was a lot of times where Greyson was holding onto the ball in the pocket. It was hard to tell from the TV copy because they don't show the secondary. COACH MARK RICHT: Good coverage. Q. It was good coverage? COACH MARK RICHT: Good coverage. Mostly -- yeah, mostly very good coverage. But you know, here's my feeling on -- good coverage in that they matched up -- you know, they're mostly a man cover team. So but the bottom line is if I'm running a route, the defender is -- if he's covering me, he's either on my back side or he's on my front side. He's got -- he can't be on the front and the back and the side. You know what I mean. He can only be in one spot. So that's when we talk about throwing the ball into a tight window; you know, there's a guy covering him, but there still is a place that the ball can be put where, you know, we have a better chance of catching the ball than he does. And a lot of times as you're going through your progressions, you know, if you see a guy getting doubled or you see a guy, you know, covered up pretty good, you go to the next guy and then the next guy. You know, the longer you hold the ball -- and that's what they -- that's part of their deal is they get you to go to your second and third progression while these D linemen are really squeezing the pocket on your quarterback and making him uncomfortable, because, you know, the more space you have in the pocket to step and throw and to see, usually you can make those tighter throws, but as you're progressing down the field and these linemen are squeezing that pocket on you, it's just a tougher throw. And then, you know, you saw them bat a couple of balls down. But you watch film, every game they're batting balls down because they're very disciplined in their rushes. Again, they're pushing the pocket, but they're also not -- like I lot of teams will just be wild. They'll go up field and make a move underneath, and then the quarterback breaks contain and all of a sudden guys are running for yards or he's throwing the ball down the field where they're like we're going to keep this guy in the pocket, we're going to squeeze this pocket and force him to go to the second or third guy and hopefully get a batted ball or a pick somewhere along the way. So again, yeah, very good coverage, but we gotta learn to throw into tighter windows than what we were facing earlier in the year. Q. I was just going to ask you about the running game. Any concerns there or simply you mentioned how big and obviously stout Alabama was up there. COACH MARK RICHT: Yeah. I think strategically, we'd have been better off trying to go downhill more than try to -- you know, there are some things we try to do outside, and with the wet turf and just some matchups we had out there on the edge, we had -- I think our best shot would have been to go downhill against them. Q. Coach, are you all wearing red? COACH MARK RICHT: We're going to wear white. Yes. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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