RICHT FROM TUESDAY PRESS CONFERENCE:

On how he rationalizes this season…
“Well, it’s not over yet, number one. At this point — we didn’t make it to the Eastern Division championship. That’s all I can say right now. It’s been up and down, but we’re battling. We’re battling.”

On changes to the offense…
“Here’s the deal, everybody. Y’all can pay attention to this. We’re Georgia. We’re a team. We work together. We’re going to fight. We’re going to fight together, and we’ll do the things we think we need to do to get better as we go, but the Georgia people can count on us fighting our tails off and doing it in a way that everybody would be proud of the effort of our young men and everybody’s efforts to get better. So that’s where we’re at right now.”

On if he has told his players to get off social media this week…
“Well, what I tell our players is to — good or bad, this is policy, period, but we try — we call it noise. We say ignore the noise, and it’s — when they’re bragging about you or they’re saying not-so-nice things about you, and just focus on what’s being said in this room by our coaches and by each other. That’s the thing you’ve got to really focus on.

You know, I can’t control what people write, and I can’t control what people read, but I can control certain things, and that’s what I focus on. That’s what our staff is focusing on, and I think that’s what our players are focusing on. But you’ve got young people that — they’ve got to walk to campus every day, go to class, and they’re around people all the time, and I think they just kind of grew up on social media all the time, so I don’t think it’s stay off of it quite frankly. It’s kind of up to them to decide what they look at.

But the biggest thing is to focus on the people that really know and understand the game, number one, know and understand this team, number two, and be mostly concerned with what it’s going to take to have success moving forward.

You know, what we’ve done to this point really doesn’t define us as much as what we do from here on, and that’s how you’ve got to handle adversity in a season and that’s how you’ve got to handle adversity in life in my opinion. You have to decide what are you going to do now. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to focus on our jobs, we’re going to fight like mad, and we’re going to do it together. That’s what we’re going to do.”

On criticism…
“It’s the nature of the business. It’s the nature of leadership. Leaders make decisions. Decisions aren’t always popular. There’s rarely a decision that’s made that everybody thinks is a great one. You know, even within our own building. But somewhere along the line we’ve got to say, okay, we’ve all agreed this is what we’re going to do and this is how we’re going to do it. But there’s definitely — anybody who’s been in a leadership position knows that there’s going to be criticism. That’s just all there is to it. Now, some jobs you might have a bad day at the office and maybe three people know, you know? We have a bad day at the office in our line of work and millions of people know and millions of people have an opinion, and a lot of people know football. A lot of people think they know football, you know, so there’s a little bit of everything.

There’s actually some pretty good constructive criticism out there, but it’s kind of obvious, I mean, we know it, too. But I’ve said for years that I’ve always wanted to be at a school where the people care. I’ve always wanted to be at a school where there’s tremendous support, where people are going to get in the stands and get excited and have passion, and you can’t just decide to have passion one way. People have opinions, and when things don’t go well, I don’t blame people for getting mad or upset or whatever. But I do want everybody in the Bulldog Nation to support our players. I think that’s the most important thing, support these guys. These guys, they’re — I mean, it’s unbelievable the amount of workload they have when you take football and school, and it’s a lot. And those guys, they need us as coaches, just to help them navigate life in general, and certainly learn how to navigate tough times.

I think there’s some great lessons that can be learned in football, but there’s some great lessons that can be learned in life for these guys, as well, because sooner or later, like I was talking to the seniors, within weeks you’re out on your own. You’re pretty much an independent adult making a lot of life decisions, and you’re getting married probably, probably have some kids, probably have issues at job or family or whatever it is, and it’s going to be tough times, and you’ve got to decide how are you going to handle the tough times. Well, you know, ignore the negativity. Negativity brings people down. No one likes negativity. So ignore that. I’ve had the ability to listen to comments that may be directed in a negative way, but if it makes sense, I’m still open-minded to listen to the idea, even though I don’t like the delivery of the idea at times. But then, you know, also begin to focus on the positive, and then focus on standing up, manning up, taking care of business, and do it hopefully in a unified manner. You know, families blow up because somebody decided it was too tough and they decided to run. You know, don’t do that. Don’t be that guy. Don’t be that guy. So that’s what we’re trying to teach them.”

On if he has decided on the starting quarterback this week…
“It would be nice to get more stability at that position, but it just hasn’t played out that way. We’re basically competing this week at a lot of positions, especially on offense, just making sure the guys aren’t too comfortable. I guess the bottom line is we want to get the best 11 on the field for whatever situation it calls. It’s not going to be just 11 guys. We know we sub. We know we have different personnel groups and things of that nature, but the bottom line is to get the best people in the game and help them execute.”

On the response of the players since last Saturday’s loss…
“I think our players appreciate how we’re handling our business as coaches and how we’re moving forward. I had a meeting with our leadership followed by a meeting with our team, kind of set the course of how we’re going to go from here. One of the things I mentioned to the team is sometimes when adversity strikes, you don’t know how to act. You’re like, how am I supposed to — you know how you feel, but how are you supposed to act, and I just wanted to help them understand how to act and how we were going to go about our business as coaches and how I was going to go about my business as head coach. So hopefully, and I think everybody took it in a real positive light and I think everybody is like, let’s go. Let’s go to work. We had a very good practice yesterday.”

On using QB Faton Bauta’s mobility…
“Well, we had — and I mentioned this on the call. Somebody asked that last night. I mean, there’s a lot of read plays that — zone read being the most popular one, and if you don’t really know for sure what a zone read is, if you took two receivers and spread them out and you’ve got two defenders on them, that’s four. Two and two is four. You’ve got a safety deep, that’s five. That leaves six defenders. So you’ve got five linemen, a quarterback and a back, so you’ve got five linemen who are going to block, okay, six guys. So there’s one guy left over. When every zone block is left, you’ve got your back sitting over here, and the quarterback will stick the ball in his belly and he’ll watch that end man on the line and he’s not being blocked, so when he’s riding that ball into that blocking scheme, if that defensive end decides he’s going to go come and make the play, that’s when the QB pulls it out and he runs. That’s a zone read as simply as I can state it.

And I imagine everybody knows, but if you didn’t know, that might be helpful. Then there’s other blocking schemes. You might have a power play where you’re reading a defender, or you might decide to block the end man on the line and read

a linebacker, and if the linebacker pursues it, people pull the ball out and throw the ball. But if you’re going to do QB run, a lot of QB run is predicated on what that unblocked guy does. And the other thing is what happens with unblocked guys, if our five don’t block their five good enough, there’s no reason to add this extra guy, if you know what I’m saying.

So for the most part we were getting whipped at the point, so they didn’t really need to add a sixth guy to start chasing down the back or feel the need to go do that where the quarterback could have pulled the ball and run with it a little bit. Now, you can run QB draw and QB sweeps and things of that nature, but we had called enough plays where he could have ran the ball, but because of how the defense had played it, he didn’t run it as much.

But, to answer your question, we would have QB run available if he’s in the game.”

On any disharmony on the coaching staff…
“Not really. You know, everything — there’s always things that happen in the heat of the battle and all that in every game. I think if you put a microphone on every — if you’ve got a play caller upstairs and you’re calling a game and every word was recorded, you know, there would be like people get hot about this, that or the other, but it’s just typical game-day type stuff. But we’ve had no issue there.”