Georgia not dancing around expectations as a title contender

Georgia's Mark Richt, speaking Thursday at SEC Media Days, has coached the Dawgs to a pair of conference championships. Butch Dill/AP

HOOVER, Ala. -- He's captured two SEC championships, holds the fourth-highest winning percentage (.789) of any coach in the country and is coming off a season in which his team finished No. 2 in the polls.

For many football followers, however, Georgia coach Mark Richt is known primarily for a dance.

Nearly nine months have passed since Richt's team's 42-30 victory over arch-rival Florida last October in Jacksonville, yet the unforgettable moment from that game -- the Bulldogs' massive, sideline-clearing end-zone celebration following their first touchdown -- was the topic du jour during Georgia's portion of SEC Media Days here on Thursday. For the umpteenth time, Richt found himself revisiting his now-famous motivational ploy that, by his own admission, went far beyond his original intention ("In my little pea brain, I'm thinking [the] 11 guys on the field") and expressed contrition for "asking the team to do an unsportsmanlike act ... In hindsight, I shouldn't have done it.")

The thing is, it worked.

It seems hard to believe now but, prior to that fateful Florida game, the Dawgs had won just five of their previous 11 SEC games, having barely survived Vanderbilt in their previous outing. Beginning with that emotionally charged victory -- just the third in the past 18 meetings with the Gators -- Georgia began a staggering second-half run culminating in a Sugar Bowl beatdown of undefeated Hawaii.

The momentum from that scorching, six-game stretch -- in which the Dawgs outscored their opponents by a nearly 20-point average margin -- has spawned the loftiest preseason expectations of Richt's eight-year tenure in Athens. Seventeen starters return from last year's 11-2 squad, most notably third-year quarterback Matthew Stafford and preseason All-America running back Knowshon Moreno. For the first time since the David Greene-David Pollack heyday of 2002-04, Georgia is being discussed as a serious national title contender, with the possibility of attaining their first-ever preseason No. 1 ranking when the polls are released next month.

(Interestingly, the SEC media don't think quite as highly of the Dawgs as most national prognosticators, as they picked Florida to win the conference in their preseason poll released Friday.)

On Thursday, Richt found himself walking the line between acknowledging the potential for a special season (he plans to vote his team "No. 2 or No. 3" on his own preseason coaches' ballot) while at the same time managing the weight of such extravagant expectations.

"To actually set [the national championship] as a goal is very difficult to do because you don't have control over it," said Richt, who dealt with similar hype almost annually during his 15 years as a Florida State assistant. "I told our guys that this [hype] could be a blessing or a curse depending on how you handle it. You don't want to be like the [1988] Seminoles that started No. 1, went out and lost 31-0 [to Miami] in the opener."

The Dawgs' meteoric rise may have begun with "The Dance," but it would be simplistic to attribute their transformation solely to Richt's ploy.

Georgia has recruited top-10 classes almost annually under Richt, but the cultivation of that talent took course during a season-and-a-half of growing pains. Following the departure of fifth-year quarterback D.J. Shockley, who led Georgia to its 2005 conference title, Richt endured the first quarterback controversy of his tenure in '06. Stafford eventually took over as a true freshman, but he and the Dawgs struggled to a 4-4 SEC record.

Georgia ended that season on a high note, with victories over three straight ranked foes (Auburn, Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech, the latter in that year's Chick-fil-A Bowl), but struggled again early last season while breaking in three freshman offensive linemen and five freshmen and sophomore defensive starters. The low point came in a 35-14 thrashing by Tennessee that dropped the Dawgs' SEC record at the time to 2-2.