The Ghost of Dennis Felton’s Past

Maybe one of the biggest obstacles Mark Fox faces in his quest to turn around the Georgia Basketball program might be something that is not even a part of the program anymore, well, at least not physically.

Apart from the aberration that took place during the SEC Tournament in 2008, Dennis Felton had a highly unsuccessful tenure at the University of Georgia as its head basketball coach and it seems that we are now starting to see the consequences of it. I have said before that not all the blame should be put on Felton, as he caught more than his fair share of bad breaks while at Georgia. To begin with he did not arrive under the best of circumstances, as the NCAA had just got done with an investigation of former coach Jim Harrick and his coaching staff that resulted in Georgia getting bathed in sanctions as to clean out the dirty residue left by Coach Harrick and his staff. Things looked promising at first under Felton, has he overachieved with basically a skeleton of Harrick’s former team save for the true freshman starting shooting guard (Levi Stukes) and beat Final Four-bound Georgia Tech on the way to a second round exit in the NIT. But then as the Harrick-recruited players started to make their way out of Athens the talent of the players under Felton started to decline. In Felton’s defense he was restricted in some ways by the NCAA in the number of scholarships we could offer. Couple that with the could-haves (Lou Williams), would-haves (Mike Mercer), should-haves (Takais Brown), and all of a sudden it is 2008 and Felton finds himself on the hot seat with nothing but Sundiata Gaines and a bag full of excuses. Then the aforementioned aberration occurs and Felton’s job is taken off life support for the time being, even after Ed Hightower and his crew referees Georgia right into an early exit of the NCAA tournament (Okay, that’s a little bit of a biased opinion, but still, if you watched that game you know what I’m talking about). It was short-lived, however, as the departure of Gaines and Dave Bliss left the Georgia basketball team without a leader, unofficially, and then officially after Damon Evans gave Felton his pink slip midway through last season. Felton went 84-91 in his five and a half seasons in Athens, with a 26-59 record in SEC play. That much losing can take its toll on a 20-year old student athlete, especially emotionally.

Maybe after six seasons of futility losing is hard-wired into the mentality of the players. That is what Mark Fox is up against, over half a decade of losing. I think one of the biggest challenges Fox faces here in Athens is getting his players to believe that they can win. The latest, and maybe the biggest, example of this happened just last Wednesday night as Fox took his team into Knoxville to face Tennessee. During the first half Georgia looked to be in control. They were not finishing as many plays on offense as maybe Fox would have liked but they were dominating on defense, suffocating Tennessee to just 24 points in the first half. Rocky Top was silent, thinking that they were headed into a sequel of what happened in Athens a month earlier, but then halftime ended. Somehow you could sense what was about to happen. In a nutshell Tennessee came out of the locker room determined after most likely being given a verbal kick-in-the-behind by Bruce Pearl. They took control of the game and then the lead, and at the same time getting the crowd behind them. The game was over as soon as Rocky Top came back to life. When Georgia is playing at the friendly confines in Stegeman Coliseum they seem like they are invincible. The game may be tight and they might fall behind but as long as they have the crowd support behind them their confidence goes through the signature of theirs and with it their level of play (Alabama can attest to that). Since the crowd believes that Georgia can win they too believe, hence their 11-3 record at the Stegasaurus. But as soon as they started hearing all the negativity directed their way from the Rocky Top faithful it seemed as if the ghost of Dennis Felton had come back to haunt them. All of a sudden Georgia stopped trying to win and instead started trying to not lose. Nobody wanted to make a mistake, to make a tough pass, to handle the ball in traffic, to score, and most of all to not believe that they could win. The first half of the Tennessee game they looked like an NCAA tournament team, and in the second they turned into elementary school kids that had just gotten their lunch money taken from them by the bullies that were Tennessee fans. It seemed that the Dawgs were so close to turning their road woes into an afterthought last Wednesday night In Rocky Top, but at the same time so far. Maybe it was a bad omen that Dennis Felton was in attendance scouting his old team, and also getting an up close look at how much better Mark Fox is than him.

As soon as Mark Fox gets his young charges to grow up and display the same product away from Stegeman Coliseum as they do on it, then the closer he will be to letting his program realize all the potential it has.

And the sooner, the better.

The (Other) Coach on Campus Named Mark

Mark Richt is a pretty polarizing figure around Athens, Georgia. Being the head coach of one of the most prestigious college football teams in America can do that to somebody, I guess. And with college football being such a hot topic year-round does not make it easy for other Georgia sports to get much attention during their respective sport’s season by any means. Being what it may that can cast a large shadow on the other sports figures around campus, but there is one that just might be crawling out from it. And wouldn’t you know it; his name is Mark, too.

If you have not heard already, Mark Fox is the new head man of Georgia’s Men’s Basketball program. He is taking full advantage of it, too, by coming into Athens and turning around a team that seemed headed into the abyss that is college basketball obscurity as over 300 teams participate in Division 1-A basketball. Make no doubt about it, all signs pointed South under Dennis Felton, who could not even seem to keep his players in the program, as he would dismiss his players from the team faster than he could bring more in to replace the ones he kicked out. Enter Fox, who has beaten the likes of Illinois, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, and not the least of which Georgia Tech while taking Mississippi, Mississippi State, and Kentucky within mere minutes of defeat. And he has done all of this with virtually the same group of players that made Damon Evans show Felton the door out of the program. I am not blaming his exit on the players by any means, and it was not all Felton’s fault, either (unless you blame his underlying uber disciplinarian complex), since most of the talent he recruited could not stay out of trouble, resulting in the ousting by Evans. But Mark Fox has maximized his players’ production this season, turning Travis Leslie into a legitimate force on the wing and making sure Jeremy Price does not let his boatload of potential decay on the Georgia bench. The duo from Columbia High School in Decatur, Ga. are a big reason of why Georgia is where it is right now (somewhere Columbia’s head basketball coach Dr. Phillip McCrary is smiling right now). Couple that with the NBA-caliber talent that Trey Thompkins (he is pretty big reason, too) possesses and Georgia is, dare we say, on its way to building an NCAA Tournament-caliber team, all under the watchful eye of Fox. Too bad Felton had to essentially waste a year of NCAA eligibility for each of them to make this happen, oh well.

When Damon Evans started searching the college basketball landscape last spring with the goal on landing a premier coach to head up his basketball program I was hoping Evans would swing for the fences and bring someone in who could turn this program around with the snap of his fingers. With all of the high profile names being floated around amid rumors I thought Evans needed to be kicked out of Athens-Clarke County and never to return when it was announced that the best he could do was persuade some no-name coach from Garden City, Kansas to leave the University of Nevada to come back with him to Athens to see what he could do with his basketball program that was in such disarray.

I guess Damon Evans is the one laughing now, because it seems he hit a home run with Mark Fox.

Have No Fear Georgia Faithful, You Have Mark Richt

Now that Signing Day has come and past and, barring a miraculous change of heart from Seantrel Henderson (wishful thinking), it looks like Georgia’s recruiting class of 2010 is pretty much complete. With Spring Practice just around the corner that culminates with the annual G-Day Game that takes place April 10, many questions and much speculation will surround The Hedges in the form of 30,000 fans when Mark Richt leads his team on the field for the most glorified scrimmage in the state of Georgia. Who will be the starting Quarterback? Just how good is new defensive coordinator Todd Grantham? Why isn’t Logan Gray moving to Flanker? How good (or bad) are the incoming freshman going to be?

Unfortunately almost none of those questions will be completely answered when the Sun goes down on April 10, but there is a glimmer of hope Georgia fans, and that is Mark Richt.

When Coach Richt took over the Georgia Football Program in 2001 he inherited from Jim Donnan a perennial 8-4 team, 9-3 if they won against Georgia Tech, and 10-2 if they beat Florida (which happened only once in Donnan’s tenure, in 1997). In the eyes of most college football fans an 8-4 record year in and year out isn’t bad, unless you have the likes of Hines Ward, Champ Bailey, Randy McMichael, Marcus Stroud, Richard Seymour…..hopefully you have gotten the point by now that so much NFL talent passed through Sanford Stadium under Donnan’s watch and he does not have a single SEC Conference championship to show for it.

Richt came from Florida State into Athens and brought the attitude of the Top-5 program he left in Tallahassee with him. He told his players that they had to “learn to win,” and “finish the drill,” and so far he has seen that through. He has two conference championships, his first in only his second year on the job, and possibly an appearance in the 2003 National Championship game had Terrance Edwards not dropped a surefire touchdown catch in the waning moments of the Florida game that year, not to mention the team in 2007 that some thought should have gone to the National Championship over LSU. He has turned Georgia into a national recruiting power with his home runs (Matt Stafford, A.J. Green) and even with his near misses (Stafon Johnson, for example, who seriously considered UGA or Southern Cal). And he gets the most out of his talent (before last season David Greene had the most victories of any quarterback in Division 1-A history, and Richt won an SEC championship with D.J. Shockley, who was doomed to be the next Quincey Carter under Jim Donnan). He has taken a program that underachieved under Coach Donnan to one that more times than not finds itself in the top-10 in the final standings (beating Georgia is such an accomplishment that Georgia Tech put the score to the Georgia-Georgia Tech game on their ACC Coastal co-champion rings the only time they have managed to beat Richt in his tenure at Georgia in 2008). He has driven up expectations so high in Athens and that is why he is under so much fire right now after an 8-win season, when that would have been just par for course under Donnan.

So cheer up Dawg fans because no matter how inexperienced the next starting quarterback will be or how low the incoming recruiting class was ranked, as long as Mark Richt is at the helm at the University of Georgia, things cannot help but look up from here.