College Football History: John Cooper and Mark Richt

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Mark Twain

College football is a game of patterns and power, ebbs and flows, and other cyclical changes that often resemble the history before it. As such, many of the current events in college football can find a parallel, at least roughly, to a previous time in the sport's existence.

One of these parallels is revealing itself in the Southeastern Conference, where the Georgia Bulldogs compete under head coach Mark Richt. After once again losing to the rival Florida Gators in disappointing fashion, the beleaguered Richt had the following to offer on a call-in show, "I think that the game this Saturday was a game that could have gone either way, but it didn't go our way. People are tired of hearing that, and I'm kind of tired of it myself. I don't like the record myself. But we are going to keep banging, and we are going to end up turning this thing around. I thought it was going to happen on Saturday, but it didn't."

To Ohio State fans, the above quote no doubt recalled memories of head coach John Cooper and his infamous struggles against the Michigan Wolverines, and his almost equally infamous defenses of those struggles.

The comparison between Richt and Cooper is a fascinating one, especially now that Richt's tenure is such a divisive topic amongst Bulldog fans. Some, like the eloquent T. Kyle King of Dawg Sports, have staunchly defended Richt against criticism, citing Georgia football history as a key reason why Richt's career is not on its last legs. And yet, there remains a groundswell of discontent in the Bulldog fanbase as they watch SEC brethren win conference and national titles on a yearly basis. Discontent is a mild way to describe the end of John Cooper's career at Ohio State, with the fanbase and administration finally being pushed to the tipping point.

How far away Mark Richt is from his own tipping point is unclear. The data, at this point, is incomplete, as Richt is only in his tenth season at Georgia, while Cooper ran the Buckeyes for thirteen before being terminated.  Unarguably, the first half of Richt's career outstrips Cooper's. In his second season at the helm, Richt put together his best season at Georgia, a 13-1 campaign that included an SEC title and a Sugar Bowl win against Florida State. While he hasn't been quite able to reach that plateau once again, he has compiled a 75% winning record, which again bests Cooper's mark of 70%. On the surface, Richt's career seems sufficiently more impressive  to avoid a comparison to Cooper, but there are some trends that make the analogy uncanny.

Cooper's Last Ten Seasons                                                                       Richt's Ten Seasons

When the first three seasons of John Cooper's time at Ohio State are removed, the two coaches have almost identical records at their respective schools. Furthermore, Cooper's 2-10-1 record against Michigan is almost matched by Richt's 2-8 record against Florida. The disappointment in both fanbases was surely similar as both coaches were (and in Richt's case currently is) mired in a horrible streak. 

Furthermore, both coaches share(d) a difficulty in keeping their players out of trouble with the law. Mark Richt has had eleven players arrested in the past year alone, a disturbing enough figure on its own, but even more striking when you recognize that the issue is not an aberration. John Cooper, memorably, had plenty of his own issues with player behavior, even earning the dubious distinction of having one player sue another player over a punch. As an aside, an often unreported  and unappreciated aspect of Jim Tressel's time in Columbus is the drastic reduction in player arrests.

The commonalities between Cooper and Richt go beyond record and arrest similarities, though. Both are CEO style coaches who are essentially at the mercy of their coordinators' proficiency. Richt, notably, went through an extensive search in hiring his latest defensive coordinator, Todd Grantham, who has recently embarrassed himself and the university with a juvenile display on the sidelines of the Florida-Georgia game, where he attempted to intimidate Florida kicker Chas Henry before the eventual game-winning kick. Beyond that childish behavior, Grantham has not done a particularly good job this year, either.

Even the situation that both coaches find themselves in at their respective programs is similar. Georgia has not won a national championship since Vince Dooley delivered the program's first in the 1980 season, on the back of Herschel Walker. John Cooper was tasked with Ohio State its first national championship since 1968, when Woody Hayes and Rex Kern defeated Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl to cap an undefeated season. The burden of these expectations is constant, and both coaches have felt them on plenty of occasions.

And here lies the crux of the issue for Georgia fans. Mark Richt is not young by any standard in the coaching profession, yet he is also not quite old enough where his retirement is imminent. So, the question becomes, do Georgia fans see Mark Richt as the man who can lead them to a national championship or, at the least, a period of success within the conference similar to the ones experienced by Florida and Alabama recently? If not, then the question becomes something entirely different, one of Georgia's perception of their position within the college football world. Are they a program that will demand success on the level of Florida and Alabama, or do they judge themselves by another metric altogether? It is not a question that an outsider can answer, but it is an interesting one to monitor, nonetheless.

In the end, John Cooper and Mark Richt are both very good coaches, and, by all accounts, very good people. But just as Ohio State needed to move in a different direction to move the program forward, Georgia may need to move in a different direction in order to take that next step towards a national championship. Without John Cooper's efforts to modernize Ohio State's facilities, strength and conditioning program, and recruiting strategy, Jim Tressel would have lacked the infrastructure to win a national championship in his second year as head coach.

Of course, if history really does rhyme, there is a successful FCS coach somewhere in the state of Georgia, waiting for his opportunity to take his beloved Bulldogs to the promised land.