ATHENS, Ga. — The pregame speeches, strangely enough, are what people who were at Georgia back then remember. The times that Mike Bobo would get in front of the offense and yell and curse in creative ways, later made famous by another certain coach at Georgia.
“He was coach (Kirby) before coach Smart got to Georgia,” recalled Doug Saylor, a student assistant and then support staffer at Georgia from 2007-14. “All those pregame rants that coach Smart had, that was Mike Bobo. But Mike Bobo’s wasn’t leaked out.”
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The other coaches, meanwhile, remember the behind-the-scenes Bobo, the glue guy who was a good recruiter and hard worker who seemed to know and get along with everybody.
“I never questioned the loyalty of Mike Bobo, or the ability in recruiting or the ability to be a team player,” said Mark Richt, Georgia’s head coach from 2001-15. “He’s what you’re looking for when you’re checking boxes and hiring a guy. You want a guy that will be competent, you want a guy that can recruit, a guy who will be loyal, a guy who is a tough, hard-nosed disciplinarian, a guy that will love the players enough to discipline. He’s got all the traits that most any head coach is looking for.”
So the intangibles aren’t in question. But Bobo will be judged in his second stint as Georgia’s offensive coordinator by one measure: how the offense does. And he has to do it this time by following a dynamic mind in Todd Monken, whose modernization of Georgia’s offense helped win two national championships before he was hired recently by the Baltimore Ravens.
Bobo returns to the role after years in the wilderness: a head coaching stint at Colorado State that ended after he fought a rare health problem, then a pair of one-year stints at South Carolina and Auburn, the latter ending with his firing after clashing with the head coach. Then came a year in the background at Georgia, checking his ego at the door and serving as an analyst for Monken, the man he replaces.
It all left him motivated and rejuvenated, observers say, much like he was almost a dozen years ago when his career also seemed at a crossroads.
A history lesson for some, a refresher for others: Georgia’s offense entered the 2012 season as a source of consternation. A year earlier it was called “vanilla” by ESPN analyst Todd McShay. The no-huddle had been introduced that season, and the Bulldogs were a respectable fourth in the SEC in scoring and yards per play, but the perception was the defense had propelled the team to the SEC championship, not Bobo’s offense, where perception held it was basically the same pro style offense Richt brought to Georgia, the same one he handed off to Bobo late in the 2006 season.
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Then came the summer practice when players found out it was changing. Bobo yelled out: “Rifle!” That meant a five-wide receiver formation.
“We’re doing rifle this year? We’re going four-wide this year?” then-senior receiver Marlon Brown later recalled. “At first I thought he was experimenting, but then we kept doing it in practice.”
Another practice, Bobo yelled out: “Pistol!” That was just out of nowhere. The spread concepts and other wrinkles kept being installed. Georgia defensive players became so curious about the new formations, heads tilting toward the other side of the field, that then-defensive coordinator Todd Grantham had to snap them back to attention.
What had gotten into Bobo?
“I don’t know,” Brown said. “But I like it, whatever it is.”
What ensued was what remains the most prolific three-year offensive run in Georgia history:
2012: Led the nation in yards per play.
2013: Set a program record with 4,085 passing yards despite myriad injuries to skill-position players.
2014: Set a program record (that still holds) with 41.3 points per game.
The answer to the question Brown couldn’t answer — what had gotten into Bobo — was part philosophical. The game was changing, so he changed with it, spurred on by recent failure, always a good motivator. It was also part practical and still relevant today: He was just making use of its strengths. When Richt first got to Georgia, he points out, the Bulldogs had Randy McMichael and Ben Watson, so they went a lot of 12 personnel (two tight ends, two receivers and a back). The 2012 and 2013 teams were strong at quarterback and receiver, so they threw the ball a lot. The 2014 team had great running backs and a smart quarterback, so they were run-heavy.
And yes, part of it was just Bobo, who was barely 30 when he became the play caller, just getting better at the job.
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“Everybody evolves, everybody grows into their role,” Richt said. “The key is to know a good idea when you see it and also to know your personnel and how to make the best use of your personnel. You have to be flexible enough to maybe do something a little different one year over the other maybe because you have a different skill set.”
Bobo, the man some Georgia fans wanted to run out of town, left on his own terms, getting the head coaching job at Colorado State. When he left, it took Georgia’s offense years to recover.
Let’s talk about the wilderness years: The offense never really was the problem for Bobo at Colorado State, which ranked in the top three in the Mountain West Conference in yards per play all but one of his years there. It scored 23 points on Alabama in 2017, 63 at San Diego State a year earlier and so on. Bobo just couldn’t get the defense right and also had a health scare, a rare autoimmune disease that put him in the hospital for 10 days during the 2018 preseason. Bobo recovered, but after the team went 4-8 in 2019, he was let go.
This coincided with the continuing struggles of the Georgia offense, leading to social media memes by Georgia fans saying “Come home, Bobo.” But Smart was working on another track, hiring Monken, and Bobo hooked on with South Carolina and mutual friend Will Muschamp.
South Carolina’s offense improved in Bobo’s one year there, going from 13th in the SEC in yards per play to 10th and from 12th in scoring to 10th. Still not great, but that was also the year when spring practice was canceled, giving Bobo hardly any time to install his system and get to know his personnel. Muschamp was also on his way out. (Bobo late in the year became interim head coach, including a game against Smart and Georgia.) When Shane Beamer was hired, Bobo was going to stay but opted to take an offer from another first-year coach, Bryan Harsin at Auburn, which proved to be a short-term mistake.
Auburn had Bo Nix at quarterback and Tank Bigsby at tailback but not much else. Nix, inconsistent his first three years, did improve under Bobo but then missed the final three games of the season, and things unraveled for the offense. Harsin and Bobo clashed, and it was more about personality and results than philosophy, according to those close to the situation.
A free agent again, Bobo did come home, a high-profile analyst working under Monken. And a year later Bobo has his job back, leading to the all-important questions: How much has Bobo changed? And how much did he need to at all?
“Here’s the deal,” Richt began to say, in answer to a question: How much might have Bobo learned under Monken the past year? “Nobody invented football, nobody invented certain schemes, everybody gets their information from somebody else, they learned it somewhere. There are a few creative ideas over the years that people have thought up obviously. But for the most part, everybody learned it somewhere. Mike already had a tremendous background in offensive football, then you add some of the thoughts that Monken had, I’m sure that helped his portfolio for ways to attack defenses.”
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That’s a theme that emerges in talking to people: Bobo is going to do the same thing he did at the end of his first stint, the same thing most offensive coordinators do, which is fit their offense to best utilize their best playmakers.
“I’ve heard a lot of people say, Oh we’re going to bring the fullback back,” Saylor said, laughing. “Well if they have a fullback.”
(They don’t.)
“Coach is all about getting the players the football,” Saylor said. “The difference-makers. He’s going to put the best combination of players on the field that give them the best chance to be successful.”
And the process for doing that was collaborative. In offensive staff meetings, Saylor recalled, Bobo solicited ideas from every coach, looking for their play call ideas on third down, red zone, etc. The coaches went to the board and voted collectively for the top five plays for given situations, then put them in the game plan.
“That’s no different than it’s going to be now,” Saylor said, citing comments from Monken that one touchdown in the SEC championship was via Bobo, another touchdown was from another analyst.
Saylor recognized the Bobo-inspired touchdown being to Ladd McConkey on a skinny post, which was a similar play to an AJ Green touchdown against Colorado in 2009: McConkey (like Green) lined up to the boundary, motion across the formation, then the corner bumped out too far, and McConkey ran the skinny post for the touchdown.
The two-point play the Bulldogs ran against Ohio State was one they ran all the time. As soon as McConkey motioned over, Saylor said he called former Georgia receivers coach Tony Ball and said: “There it is.”
“We always used to say this play is undefeated when ran correctly,” Saylor said. “We run it every year. But we dress it up with formations and motions and that kind of stuff. But there are a few schemes out there where I see it and say: We ran that. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it was a coach Bobo play because a lot of people run the same plays.”
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Hutson Mason, who was Bobo’s last starting quarterback at Georgia in 2014, became an SEC Network analyst and ended up with two of South Carolina’s games in 2020. He thought the scheme was similar to the offense Mason played in at Georgia, going under center with old-school play-action fades, using a fullback, lots of tight ends. It also worked a lot of the time: Kevin Harris was second in the SEC in rushing in 2020. Mason covered a game when South Carolina carved up Ole Miss on the ground (318 yards and five rushing touchdowns).
“If he hadn’t been here last year, I would have been more skeptical about the transition,” Mason said. “But the fact that he was there, and he’s going to run Todd Monken’s system, and what I mean by that is he’s going to use his verbiage and put his own flavor on it, is great for the players, and especially the quarterback battle, those players not having to learn new verbiage, a whole new system, is super important.”
There are a couple of more reasons that have been cited for why Bobo will succeed again. One is the talent on the offensive side of the ball; it’s misleading to say there wasn’t enough before: The 2014 offense had nine future NFL Draft picks, plus undrafted free-agent David Andrews, who has had the best career of them all. But the talent base now may still be better.
GO DEEPER
Mike Bobo was the safe hire for Georgia, which may make him the right hire for this era
“We were super talented. But they’ve stacked some classes of recruits that are unreal,” said Tavarres King, a Georgia receiver from 2009-12. “That’s another thing I’m intrigued to do, what coach Bobo can do with this amount of talent at various positions.”
As for the talent on defense, well there’s little disagreement on that. There was one year in Bobo’s play-calling tenure — 2011 — when Georgia’s defense truly carried the team. Otherwise, not so much.
The detractors will point to individual play calls that backfired, most notably a fourth quarter at South Carolina in 2014 when Todd Gurley did not get the ball on first down at the goal line, and the result was an intentional grounding call, a missed field goal and a loss. Counterpoint: The final score was 38-35, another example of a game when Bobo didn’t have the benefit of a shut-down defense.
“What you’ve got to understand is there were times at Georgia I felt offensively we needed to do things to help our defense,” Richt said. “In doing so you might not get as many yards or as many points, but you secure victory. Playing a certain way when you get a lead, or things of that nature. Florida State, with Mickey Andrews, we could just go full speed ahead, go as fast as you wanna go, because we knew they were going to get a stop and that would be the end of it.”
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Defense, as everyone knows, seems pretty well set under Smart.
Offense is again the source of intrigue, with Monken off to the NFL and a familiar face back in charge. Bobo evolved in his first stint at Georgia and may have to show again that he’s adjusted to how the game has changed.
“That’s what his success will come down to,” Mason said. “He’ll have to change a little bit. He’ll have to be different and adapt his offense to the strengths of this team. Kirby will make him, that’s part of coaching, that’s part of doing your job, is finding the strengths of your team, and studying new designs and new philosophies. … I would think he would.”
Saylor, on that last point, is even more emphatic. He doesn’t think Bobo will change the Georgia offense much, if at all.
“I think it would be full steam ahead,” Saylor said. “I don’t see why it would be anything different.”
(Illustration: Sean Riley / The Athletic; Photos: Wesley Hittz / Getty Images)
