Lakatos Hired as DB Coach

David Hale has the press conference notes from the Scott Lakatos hire. My overall reaction is mixed. He's qualified for the gig, and that's no small thing. Plus, Grantham knows/trusts the guy. Both of those things are huge in building a staff.

However, the lack of deep Southeastern / Georgia recruiting ties isn't ideal. The good news...not having in state recruiting ties isn't the worst thing (in small doses on the staff).

Georgia Football isn't like Georgia Basketball. Area high school football coaches will give you the time of day simply because of who you represent. Building the relationships from there..it's up to him. In other words, I'm not worried about the lack of southern connections as long as the guy is a lights out position coach AND he can build those relationships over time.

There is still one open position on the coaching staff. It will either be a full-time special teams coach, which I'm totally against due to a parade of reasons too long to get into tonight. Or it will be an outside linebackers coach with the staff sharing special teams responsibilities.

Update -- You guys in the comments asked why I'm against a full-time special teams coach. Several coaches have an area of responsibility in special teams currently. For instance, Searels handles field goals and extra points, Coach Ball (pretty sure) handles kickoff returns, and Fabris handled punt returns and kickoff coverage. Not sure who handled punting in general. All of our special teams are NOT broken. Kickoff returns coverage were badly broken and the coverage of fake punts were broken, and we fired Fabris who ran all of that.

The solution there isn't hire a new special teams coach to manage all special teams. The solution is hire someone better than Fabris. The solution is also to put better athletes on special teams which UGA started doing mid-2009, and the solution is to spend more time on special teams in practice.

Spending more time on special teams in practice is tricky. It's not an issue of coaching staff bandwidth. The problem is that the same players who are doing offense or defense drills are the same ones needed (except kickers) to do special teams drills. So, let say we're spending 20% or even 30% of our time in practice sessions on special teams. That means we're could be paying a special teams coach to spend 70-80% of his time either A. Standing with his finger in his ear. or B. Talking to the kickers. The kickers clearly are not the problem. So why hire a dedicated special teams coach to do nothing during most of practice?

In my opinion...if we have a dedicated special teams coach, then his name should be Mark Richt.

PWD