Both No. 7 Georgia and No. 10 LSU possess talented players on both sides of the ball, but Saturday’s game could come down to coaching.
Bulldogs coach Mark Richt and Tigers coach Nick Saban have similar track records in the Southeastern Conference.
Richt debuted as a head coach for UGA in 2001 with an 8-4 campaign.
He followed that with a 13-1 record in 2002, including an SEC championship and Sugar Bowl win against Florida State and his mentor Bobby Bowden. Richt has the Bulldogs positioned to compete again for the SEC crown with a 3-0 record (1-0 SEC).
This is the ninth season Saban has been a head coach, and he has never had a losing season. Saban’s first year at LSU also resulted in an 8-4 record followed by a 10-3 record, including an SEC championship and a Sugar Bowl win against Illinois in 2001.
After an 8-5 season in 2002 Saban has his players looking to take the SEC championship back for LSU (3-0).
Saban said injuries to key players such as quarterback Matt Mauck and the success the players had in 2001 contributed to inconsistency last season.
“Sometimes you have some bad luck, lose some key players and maybe you can’t play as well as you think you could,” Saban said. “I think it’s much more difficult trying to get players to play when they’ve been successful than it is to get them to play when they haven’t had success and they want to prove that they should be successful.”
The Bulldogs do not seem to have the same problem the Tigers faced last year, Saban said.
“Obviously, they don’t have some of the problems that we had down the road last year,” Saban said. “When things didn’t go well and we lost a few key players, we didn’t seem to play at the same level with intensity.”
Saban said Richt has success at UGA because of his ability to take talented players and get them to compete as a unit.
“He took over a Georgia team that’s been a traditionally great program,” Saban said. “[He has] done a fantastic job there with it, got the good players that they had there a lot similar to what we did here and [got them to] play hard together and play as a team. They’ve had a lot of success because of that and they have a very good team this year.
“They’re a well-coached team and Mark has done a phenomenal job there with the program all the way around.”
Saban said another strong point of the Bulldogs is their well-coached offense. Richt is very experienced on the offensive side of the ball after being on Bowden’s FSU staff as quarterback coach (1990-94) and offensive coordinator (1994-2000).
Richt helped send five quarterbacks to the NFL while at FSU, including Brad Johnson who led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the Super Bowl in 2002.
As an offensive coordinator, Richt’s offense never scored less than 37 points per game.
The Seminoles ranked first in the NCAA in total offense with 549 yards per game in 2000 under Richt’s direction.
Richt’s first two years at Georgia do not reflect the same offensive success. During his first two years, the Bulldogs scored 30.61 points and 413.05 yards per game.
Football has always been a big part of Richt’s life, but the University of Miami (Fla.) alumnus said he realized life was more than playing football after playing second fiddle to John Elway as a member of the Denver Broncos and Dan Marino in Miami.
He took his first assistant coaching job as an assistant at FSU in 1985 and married his wife Katharyn in 1987. The Richts had two children biologically, and then they chose to adopt two more children from the Ukraine. Richt said he and his wife felt a religious obligation to adopt the children.
“We were in Sunday School class one day talking about the ills of society,” said Richt. “We explored questions like ‘who’s in charge of taking care of the poor and the elderly.’ We felt like the church should do its share.”
Richt said the reason he chose to go to Georgia was the family atmosphere and rich football tradition.
“We wanted a place to raise our family, have a chance to win at the highest level, and become part of a community where we can live for a long time,” Richt said. “We found all those things in Athens and the University of Georgia.”