Richt And Grantham Don’t See Eye To Eye On Effort Issues

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In the minds of some Georgia fans, Mark Richt is only admitting the obvious.  Possibly.  But it’s not often you hear a coach make statements such as this:


“When you watch the film and you see another team played harder than we did, that’s sad, that’s my fault.  We had some games like that in my opinion.  I can name one for sure and that’s the bowl game.  It was most evident that game, maybe that’s the one in my craw and is the one I’m talking about most.”


Richt was referring to the Bulldogs’ 10-6 loss to Central Florida in the Liberty Bowl.  Oddly, defensive coordinator Todd Grantham — rather than taking a “none of us played well” attitude — disagreed strongly with his boss when asked about the effort of his defensive squad:


“Not on defense.  It ain’t happened on defense.  When you look at the Central Florida game, I thought the guys on defense were busting their tail.  Now, we didn’t finish the game the way that we wanted to, but to say that those guys outworked us, that ain’t right.  That didn’t happen.”


First, that comes across as a bit of insubordination on Grantham’s part.  Second, he certainly didn’t defend Mike Bobo’s offensive unit, did he?

Who knows how the question was posed to Grantham?  But it’s highly unusual to see a coordinator disagree with his head coach so strongly and so publicly.  Why it’s even more unusual than a head coach admitting that his team got “out-efforted” on the playing field.