Doug Gillett (DG): I was actually a rabid Washington Redskins fan long before I was an SEC football fan; we didn’t move to Georgia until right before I started high school, so I didn’t pay that much attention, I guess. But I went to Georgia thanks to the HOPE Scholarship in the fall of 1995, and it didn’t take me long to get swept up in the hype over the football program and the litany of gameday rituals. Neither one of my parents went to Georgia, so I didn’t get much pressure from them one way or another as far as which program I was supposed to support, but I’ve managed to turn them both into Dawg fans almost as devoted as myself.

 

 

(G1): Describe the gameday atmosphere.

 

(DG): Athens isn’t all that big a town, but it’s still big enough that bringing the whole place to a halt is still an impressive feat, and that’s what happens for every home game. The RVs start showing up around Wednesday evening, the hibachis start getting busted out around Friday afternoon, and if you need to get your car out of any of the central-campus lots, you better do it Friday morning, because trying to extricate your car anytime after then is like trying to put together a puzzle without the benefit of a box top to look at. I have the good fortune of being friends with the masterminds behind one of the biggest and most prominent tailgates on campus, and we make a whole day of it — satellite TV to watch the other games, huge food spread, trivia games, etc. It’s kind of like an all-day picnic-slash-wedding-reception-slash-frat-party, and we get to do it six or seven times a year.

 

 

 

(DG): Last year, for the first time since Mark Richt came to campus, I was honestly disappointed with the job our coaching staff did; for whatever reason, we seemed to take a very timid, hands-off style that we really ended up paying for in the wholesale defensive collapse we experienced in the second half of the season. But all reports I’ve heard out of Athens indicate that they’ve learned a lot of lessons and will be working twice as hard (and making the players do the same) going into 2009. We’ve recruited extraordinarily well under Richt, particularly over the last couple years, and though we don’t really run any types of spread formations in our offense, that’s nothing that I’ve ever been particularly upset about. We run a fairly straightforward pro-style offense, there are plenty of very talented kids out there who want to play in it, and I think we’re stocked for some very impressive seasons over the next few years.

 

 

 

(DG): Georgia is one of the few teams out there that still gives the fullback the ball and makes him an integral part of our offense, and we’ve had some good ones under Richt, J.T. Wall and Brannan Southerland being just a couple. The latest guy in that lineage is Shaun Chapas (6’2”, 238), who’s a formidable blocker but also a good runner and “safety valve” in the passing game. He and tight end Aron White (another fairly under-hyped player I’m excited about) will be important in that regard as we try to break in a receiving corps that, outside of A.J. Green, is still pretty untested at this point.

 

 

 

(DG): The grousing over “When’s Mark Richt gonna win a national title” has grown particularly loud after the disappointments of last season, but consider that that 2008 team underachieved by pretty much anyone’s definition and still won 10 games. In eight seasons under Richt, we’ve finished with double-digit win totals all but twice, and I think the stability he’s brought to the program is something that has been — well, maybe not overlooked, but certainly underappreciated. In the decade or so before his arrival, we’d ping-pong between nine- or 10-win seasons and embarrassing losing campaigns, and we’d be sweating games against teams like Auburn or Georgia Tech even when they weren’t very good. Now we win at a very consistent level and have been consistently competitive against every arch-rival except for Florida. Consider that we ended the 20th century on a three-year losing streak to Georgia Tech and a nine-year losing streak to Tennessee, and you can better appreciate what Richt has accomplished in Athens.

 

As far as the conference as a whole, I think all the talk about how good our defenses are sometimes obscures the fact that our offenses are pretty good, too. Obviously Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow have been lighting up the scoreboard for a few years now, but Richt’s offense at Georgia has been consistently strong (sorry, there’s that word again), LSU always seems to have a massive stockpile of offensive talent, and Bobby Petrino seems destined to turn Arkansas into a scoring machine sooner or later. Sometimes it might not seem that way because, well, they have to go up against SEC defenses. But when it comes to both offensive talent and innovation, I’ll take the Pepsi Challenge with any other league in the country, Big XII and Pac-10 included.

 

 

 

(DG): I think in general they’re a good idea, and certainly the SEC’s innovation in that regard served to increase interest in an already prestigious league. I think going to 12 was a good idea, and while I miss having both Auburn and Ole Miss on the schedule every year, I like the variety of having only one permanent SEC West opponent (Auburn) annually with the other two spots rotating from year to year.

 

 

 

(DG): I thought the pre-BCS system was mostly OK, and while I may have complained about the possibility of split national titles back then, experiencing the current system (where we have to throw in a bunch of computer rankings and secret ballots and title disputes aren’t necessarily solved) has made me appreciate the old ways of doing things. I don’t think I concentrate on national titles any more than I used to; certainly it’d be nice to win one, but given how small the margins for error are in today’s college football environment, where even one loss might be enough to knock you out of the running, I can accept an 11-2 or 10-3 season and not get too broken up about “what might have been.”

 

 

 

(DG): I hate the BCS, which I think puts me pretty much in the mainstream of SEC fans (even though the BCS system certainly hasn’t hurt our conference recently in terms of the opportunity to win national titles). My preferred system, though, might be a little outside-the-box: I don’t want a playoff, I just want to go back to the old pre-Coalition system where bowls could invite whichever teams they wanted and poll voters could vote for whomever they wanted as national champion. Which would create an even greater chance of having a split national title, but after a decade of having to wade through decimal points and ballot gamesmanship on the part of the coaches, I’ve decided that a split national title isn’t actually the worst thing that could happen in college football.

 

 

 

(DG): I think you have to have some kind of polls, which means they have to play some kind of role in the national-championship race by default, but I don’t think the coaches should have a vote. They’re too busy game-planning and motivating their own teams — how can they possibly pay attention to 119 others? Give the sportswriters a vote, and maybe the athletic directors and/or SIDs, but leave the coaches out of it. They’ve got enough to do without filling out ballots every week (or should I say assigning a grad assistant to fill them out).

 

 

 

(DG): I watch those teams a lot because I worked at UAB for seven years and found myself following Conference USA a lot more closely during that time. I think that non-BCS teams should have every right to compete in the top-tier bowls if they’ve accomplished enough in the regular season to earn a bid, but voters in the polls that help determine which teams end up where also have every right to look at a 12-0 or 11-1 team from the Mountain West or WAC and say, “Yeah, you’ve got an impressive record, but you’ve played a crap schedule — I still don’t think you’re as deserving of a BCS bid as this 11-1 or 10-2 team from the SEC or Big XII.” It’s not really a fair system at the moment and there’s not a whole lot that can be done, in the grand scheme of things, to change it; in truth, I’d be happy if the bowls got rid of conference tie-ins entirely and just invited whomever they wanted, regardless of league affiliation or BCS/non-BCS status.