I moved to Athens, Georgia, more than two years ago, and ever since I got here, I've been told how different it is. Sure, they're crazy about college football in Athens -- I'll never forget the first time I went to a grocery store here, a 4-year-old-boy just randomly started barking in the checkout line -- but people have taken great pains to note that they're not like those people. We love football, but, to borrow a long- hackneyed phrase from baseball, they love it the right way. They would never hire someone solely to win games, in any sport; when Bruce Pearl came on the market after his NCAA suspension ended, Georgia couldn't turn up its nose fast enough. We would never win that way. (Former coach Jim Harrick earned the program a four-year probation, and he is spoken of today only in whispers.) They would never be Tallahassee, they told me, or Happy Valley, places so obsessed with winning that they would ignore, willfully or otherwise, a cancer at its core. This is the place where the hometown cops don't look away when a student-athlete commits a minor crime; the rules are the same for everyone, even if it hurts the team.
College football can take over towns, change their central character, but the whole Georgia thing is that it's something you should be as proud of as they are of themselves. It's a place where a guy can coach for 15 years without winning a national championship, and it's OK, because his teams are competitive every year, he will never embarrass the program or the city and he's a prince of a human being. Sometimes you see him at the dry cleaner. He says hi, and waves, and everyone has an extra bounce in their step the rest of the day.
And it has set the tone for the whole town. I love my adopted hometown, a place where Jason Aldean, Jason Isbell and Cracker comfortably play shows on consecutive nights, where even the philosophy professors have season tickets, where you can run into Michael Stipe and Tim Tebow at the same restaurant on the same night. (The National, get there.) It's a place that loves football but is not of football. It's passionate about football, but not insane about it. You gather every home Saturday to celebrate and cheer, and you welcome others. You don't see fights at Georgia tailgates. They have told me this place is special, different, and I have believed them. This has become my home. I feel good here.
But I can't help but feel something about it changed Sunday morning.
I don't mean to be overdramatic about it: My kids made it to school just fine this morning without being attacked by sharks or anything. But when Georgia athletic director Greg McGarity announced Sunday morning that the university and head football coach Mark Richt had "mutually agreed" that Richt would step down -- which everyone knew was an actual firing -- it felt like a shift in what this school, and thus this town, is about.
For 100 years, Georgia football was Georgia football, the world of Vince Dooley, and Herschel Walker, and Todd Gurley, and yes, Mark Richt. This was its own unique animal, one that wanted to win, sure, obviously, but also wanted specifically to do it its own quiet way. This was a place that looked at Tennessee firing Phil Fulmer, or LSU considering firing Les Miles, and it shook its head and chuckled. We would never be so brash and reactionary: It's different here. And then, Sunday, Georgia football announced that it wasn't satisfied being Georgia football. It wanted to be Alabama football.
...
The move to fire Richt was, in this way, the precise reactionary one that Georgia has always claimed it wasn't about. At a bizarre press conference on Monday morning, McGarity attempted to keep up the façade that Georgia remained the classy place you thought it was, heaping praise on the man he had just fired right as he sat next to him. He was able to bathe himself in the Christian good nature of Richt, who answered questions honestly but with no malice or anger toward the executioner a few feet away; Richt, by taking the high ground at every opportunity, allowed McGarity to believe he was somehow still doing things the Right Way, even as he evaded every question and refused to even give a reason for Richt's dismissal.
Richt said he told his players that the way you feel and the way you act should be two different things, and he couldn't have exemplified that any better in his press conference. McGarity tried to pretend he was somehow doing the right thing by Richt by standing beside him, that it meant Georgia football Stood For Something. But the only reason you felt that way was because of Richt.