Sports

UGA proves again that good, ethical coaching is not the goal

ATLANTA — The two "Marks" were very close.  
 
Mark Richt was in his 15th season as Georgia head football coach in the fall of 2015.  At that same time, Mark Fox was just beginning his seventh season as UGA head men's basketball coach.  Both were, by all accounts, men who had improved the two biggest money-making programs on the Athens campus since they'd first arrived.
 
Yet, that November, three days after Thanksgiving (and one day after his team's regular season concluded), Richt learned that he no longer was wanted by the administration.  Fox received similar word on Saturday, one day after his team's season ended.

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Richt has moved on to his alma mater, and just as he did at Georgia, he's turned around the Miami football program for the better in his two seasons in Coral Gables, Fla.  Fox hopes to do the same when (not if) he decides to continue his coaching career.
 
Mark Fox is one of the most respected coaches in Division I basketball today.  Within the first 90 seconds of his exit news conference, one could witness the love he has for those close to him, too, as he choked up when thanking his family, staff and players for the sacrifices they all made during his nine years leading the Bulldogs.

Unless you’re at Kentucky, coaching men’s basketball in the Southeastern Conference will always be a somewhat thankless, second-fiddle job to the football programs.  Yet Fox did a commendable job, winning 163 games, third-most in UGA history (behind only college basketball hall-of-famer Hugh

Durham and the man whose name adorns the building in which the basketball team plays, Herman J. Stegeman).  He led the Dawgs to a pair of NCAA tournaments and developed two SEC Players of the Year in Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Yante Maten, the former a current NBA player and the other on a path toward making it to the league.
 
When I asked Fox at what point he would stop to reflect on his accomplishments in Athens, in typical fashion, he pointed the spotlight elsewhere, noting how he enjoyed the input he had on the renovation of Stegeman Coliseum … "so the next coach could use it" as a tool to recruit even better talent.
 
Mark Fox won games, just not enough of them to allow Georgia fans to sit on the edges of their seats when it came to Selection Sunday.  Not enough to prevent midseason collapses that forced furious end-of-year runs, in attempts to make cases for invitations to "The Big Dance."
 
When UGA director of athletics Greg McGarity relieved Richt of his duties that late November day in 2015, he made it his mission to bring back an alumnus who just happened to be the hottest assistant coach in America at the time.  That move has paid off, as Kirby Smart led his alma mater to its first SEC championship in a dozen years and seconds away from its first national title in 37 seasons.

Georgia also used that momentum to secure the first No. 1 recruiting class in the history of the football program.  
 
Will McGarity's next move reap just as big of a reward for the basketball program? 
 
We shall see.  But one thing we can all be sure of is this … Mark Fox will coach again and soon.  
 
And he'll continue to try to get a program to the top by running it the right way.