	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 25, 2017

Mark Richt

Greensboro, North Carolina

MARK RICHT: It's good for those guys to get those -- not necessarily awards, but at least attention, and it just proves the point of if you win games, then those types of things happen. I think if you're not winning, it's harder for those players to get that type of attention. Not that that's what we're built on by any means, but the goal is to win and to not care who gets the credit. But more people tend to get credit when you do win.

Q. Carla Williams was hired as Virginia athletic athlete director. She talked a lot about you and your work with her. What stands out, and why did you ask that she be the one to supervise for you when you were together?
MARK RICHT: Well, first of all, I thought she was the sharp he's person within our administration, and I knew she had a real level head, and I knew she was a person of high integrity and communication skills. I just knew I would be able to work well with her, and she kind of -- I think she gets the big picture and understands how to get things done.

Q. You guys obviously were tremendously successful at Georgia with football. Does she have a special understanding of what it takes to win at that level in football?
MARK RICHT: I think she does. I think she does at all sports. I mean, the ingredients are mostly the same as far as hiring good people and doing whatever you can to give that coach that you've hired the resources to get things done. And when you can do it, you get it done, and when you can't do it, you're able to communicate maybe why it can't be done or maybe why you don't agree that this is important or a priority.

You know, that goes a long way when you can -- when you know what it means to get it done, but you also can communicate when things can't get done.

Q. Looking back 10 years ago to the Georgia-Florida game and the celebration after Knowshon's score, what do you remember about that, and where does that game stack up in terms of all the ones you've participated in?
MARK RICHT: Well, what led to it is we got beat really bad by Tennessee, and then the next game we played was Vanderbilt, and we barely won it, and there was not a lot of enthusiasm, and I was like, we've got to create some energy somehow. And so when I was at coordinator at Florida State, I used to -- every so often, say, hey, when we score, you guys celebrate hard enough -- just celebrate hard, and if you don't celebrate hard enough to get a flag, then you didn't celebrate hard enough.

So whether it's right or wrong, that was the thinking behind it. And that's what I told our team, and what I thought they heard was the team that's on the field, you celebrate, because what happened during the week is we had an open date actually, and so every time they'd score against the scout team, some guy would like try to spike it through the goal post or spin the ball. I'm like, you guys don't get it, this is a team celebration, not an individual celebration. I think when I said the whole team needs to celebrate, or when I said the team needs to celebrate, they thought the whole team, and I was really talking about whoever was in the game at the time. So when he scored, they really felt like they had an obligation to go celebrate, and they got at least two penalties. But the goal really was not for the team to come off the bench. The goal was for the guys on the field to just celebrate real hard, and as it turned out, everybody ran out there except for Dannell Ellerbe, and I think he was in the doghouse and he knew not to go out.

But the other thing that happened, too, was similar to the Florida State game this year, when our receiver Langham made the catch that won the game, the touchdown, when he caught the ball, our sideline went crazy, and we had number spill over to the field, we got a penalty there. And as it turned out, on both of those plays, Knowshon's play and Langham's play, it was under review. If we did not score on either one of those, it would have been 3rd and 16, I think in both cases, which would have been horrible, and maybe wouldn't have won either game.

Q. Roquan Smith, you guys signed him, lingered into the next day. Do you remember thinking this is a special guy in terms of his play making ability, and have you seen him on TV much?
MARK RICHT: I have not seen him. I've heard people talk about him, though. I haven't studied anything or watched a bunch of it, but I know people are talking great tings about him, and athletically, he's just one of those guys that can really run, and he's still a very physical guy. If physical, thumping type linebackers can run, then they can be pretty special.

Q. The ACC has a bunch of pretty high-quality all-purpose guys and you'll be facing one this week. Can you speak to in general the league's strength in that area, and how do you prepare for a guy like Ratliff?
MARK RICHT: Right. Well, we do have a lot of guys like that, and of course we had Mark Walton, who was a multipurpose guy. Travis Homer now is kind of becoming that for us. I don't know, I think the bottom line, when you have guys that are productive in a lot of different ways, you still when you break it down, there's only -- you can only play one position at a time. You can only do one skill set at a time. So I think you just try not to go too crazy trying to stop one guy because all of a sudden you open up holes. You've just got to be sound with what you're doing defensively and run to the ball and tackle and do the things that good, fundamental defenses do.

Q. The league is very strong in their all-purpose players right now. They have nine of the top 50.
MARK RICHT: That's great. That just goes to show we're recruiting kids with a lot of ability, and they're making plays.

Q. Travis Homer seems to have settled in very nicely since Mark Walton went down. How has he come along, and what's his ceiling?
MARK RICHT: Well, I remember when I first saw his tape, he was one of the first guys I looked at when I took the job, and there was actually two guys we had committed -- excuse me, that were committed to Miami, not to the new staff, I guess, and one guy, who's probably doing great wherever he's at, I can't remember his name, I thought he was a little undersized, and then even homer, I was thinking, I don't know if he's that big. I met him in person at school but he was coming off of a surgery, and he just didn't look physically strong enough to take the pounding that a running back has to take. And then when he got healthy and he got on campus and he started working out, I mean, the guy really took to the weights, and he's much more physically built than I really thought his frame would carry. He's just a workaholic, and he's just got great vision, great speed, good hands, he's smart, he's tough. I mean, he's really a good back, and he's become -- I think he'll become better even as he gets bigger and stronger as time goes on.

Q. You're playing a team that's 1-7 and coming off a terrible beating last weekend. What are the things to beware of against them in particular and just a game like that?
MARK RICHT: Well, I think maybe one example -- you see the score, and you're thinking, Virginia Tech must have scored at will, if you didn't see the game, which I did not. So I start watching the tape of North Carolina's defense. First drive, second drive, third drive, I think they got -- Virginia Tech didn't score but the scoreboard kept lighting up. I'm like, obviously it had to be a defensive score here or there or special teams score. But I guess the point I'm making is if you just looked at the tape of the first three or four drives of that game, North Carolina's defense played really good. And then by about halftime, I quit watching it as a game, and I started looking at it by down and distance and formation and all that. But sometimes you've just got to look at a game in the context of how it was played, and I mean, I was expecting a defense that was struggling and couldn't get a stop, and then what I saw was something completely different.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297