By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

David Greene certainly doesn’t look or sound much different now than he did when he was the Georgia quarterback to break the Bulldogs’ dry spell of 20 years without an SEC championship.

Watching and listening to Greene makes it hard to believe that that was all the way back in 2002. Still fresh-faced at 37, Greene took Monday night’s crowd at the Macon Touchdown Club on a trip down Memory Lane, a well-timed trip at the beginning of Georgia-Florida week.

Like most, Greene - who got to visit with former teammate and center Ryan Schnetzer, now a spine surgeon at OrthoGeorgia - sees two evenly matched teams with different flaws getting ready for the game that yet again – after a little break – will decide the SEC East. And he gets itchy.

Greene on Fromm

“I’ve been blown away since he stepped foot at school here. The way he handled himself his true freshman year, I don’t know how he did it. The boy was playing at (Houston County) High School … and then a year later, he’s playing Alabama in the national championship game and Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl, and he looked like he had been doing it for years, right?

“The thing that I was really impressed with: you can tell the kid is really self-aware. He never seemed to try to do more or make more out of it that what he was supposed to. He played smart. I’ve been impressed with him since Day 1.

“The other thing I like about him, he’s a great competitor. He’s somebody that week in, week out, we know what we’re gonna get form jake fromm. He’s not gonna mail it in or say, ‘We’re gonna beat these guys by 50, I’m not gonna play hard.’ That kid shows up and plays, no matter what.

“I normally to watch quarterbacks more when I know that we’re down. We’re down by two touchdowns and there’s four minutes to go in the game, and we know we’ve lost. Say we’re down by three touchdowns. I judge quarterback more in those moments because you just figure out if they like football or not. Are they competitors when the game is out of hand? You’re not gonna win, but you’re still gonna play hard.

“I’ve only seen Jake in that situation once – and I really don’t want to see him I that situation again – but you learn a lot from guys in that situation.

“We’re totally blessed as fans to have him as our quarterback. That’s the one thing as a fan: I don’t want us to miss our window with him. We’ve got to figure out how to make this offense work. Same thing with D’Adndre Swift. He’s such a unique talent. We’ve got to find a way to put them in situations where they can be more productive.”

Greene on UGA’s offensive “issues”

“The challenge is when you look at it on paper, you look at our players, and you go, ‘These big boys should be able to move these guys. When you have this running back, you just have to be able to give him some space to make it happen.’ But at the end of the day, your job as a coach, and I’ll say this for any coach, in the most simplistic form is take the personnel that you have (and) how can you tap into its ability and make it shine above the best. And I’d say a great example of that is Joe Burrow at LSU.

“Joe Burrow was the quarterback at LSU last year. And we were not talking about Joe Burrow last year, were we? That’s because he ran the I formation, two (tight ends), and they were a run-first team and threw when they needed to. … The offense they’re playing (with) now emphasizes and taps into the potential that kid has at quarterback. But also the offense kind of unleashes what they’re capable of doing. …

“As a coach, have we gotten creative enough at this point to design plays that emphasize and take advantage of the ability that we have? We haven’t found that yet, in my opinion. Having said that, is it easy to line up and find that blueprint week 1 or 2? The answer’s no.”

He noted that the New England Patriots took 10 games last year to move from an offense built around Tom Brady to one built around the running game, and former Bulldog Sony Michel.

“They totally changed their plan of attack about week 10 last year. … It’s not easy to see that early on. It took (Bill Belichick) 10 weeks to kind of figure out what they could do.

“That’s a long way of saying we haven’t found our blueprint yet.”

“It’s weeks like this,” he said during a chat of about 40 minutes. “That feeling you get. Big games like this, leading up to the game. Man, I miss that more than anything.

“That moment, about three or four hours, when you’re about to play a game, and you know pretty much your state that you’re playing for has put its life on pause, and depending on how you play pretty much dictates the mood of the state for that weekend …

“It’s a lot of pressure, but if you’re wired a certain way, it’s a lot of fun, too.”

Greene is on the fence as far as the debate about the game staying in Jacksonville or going to home sites, but said the game does bring back one regular memory, long before kickoff.

“When you’re coming to the game, you come up and over that bridge,” he said. “It’s quiet on the bus, everybody’s getting their mind right and ready to play. And you know your whole family, and friends, Athens, Georgia, and everywhere else, fans around Georgia, are down there tailgating and getting ready for the game.

“The first time you see it is when you come up and over that (bridge) and come down. It’s just madness down there below, and you know it’s time to go.”

And one can’t talk about Georgia-Florida without talking about Steve Spurrier. Naturally, like pretty much anybody who played or coached in the SEC during Spurrier’s time, Greene had a Ball Coach story. Or two.

Danny Wuerffel was a young standout Florida quarterback making his debut, and marched the Gators downfield. Then a receiver was supposed to run an out route to the sideline, but went inside. Wuerffel threw to the designated spot, and was picked off. So he trudged over to the sideline, not expecting too much grief because, well, it was the receiver’s fault.

“Spurrier fidgets, and does his stuff, dancing around like this,” Greene said, doing a little imitation. “Coach goes over to Danny. ‘Danny, eh, don’t worry about that, that’s on me. Don’t worry about it, that’s on me.”

Wuerrfel begins to relax. For a second.

“ ‘I, I should’ve known better than to put you in. I should’ve.”

Greene asked Spurrier about the story, and got this:

“Nah, Danny, I wouldn’t have said that to Danny. Now, Doug Johnson, I’d have said that to.”

As for Spurrier’s legendary dislike of the Bulldogs, Greene recalled sitting at table with Spurrier and his wife at a banquet, and things were going smoothly.

And then Spurrier had a question.

“He looks over at me, says, ‘David, has Aaron Murray broken all your records to this point?’”

As for the ongoing debate on differences between Kirby Smart and Mark Richt, Greene said reality didn’t quite match a perception offered by Richt critics.

“When Coach Richt got to Georgia, you talk about a tough place to play,” Greene said. “I wasn’t around for Coach Richt’s later years, but those first couple years he was there, I’m tellin’ ya man. It was a grind.”

There were the famed mat drills, which test, well, about every part of the participant’s mind and body.

“When Coach (Jim) Donnan was here, we worked,” Greene said. “But I never knew what working was until he left and Coach Richt came.

“When I did the first mat drill of my life, I remember vividly thinking, ‘When do you actually die? Do you know when you’re about to die? Is there a sign?’”

The first few days, players didn’t get water, adding to the already grueling routine. That changed after the death of Florida State’s Devaughn Darling in 2001 during offseason training.

And practices were much more, for lack of a better word, spirited than perceived.

“There would literally be team fights every day in practice, where you would have the entire offensive line brawling with our entire defensive line,” he said, breaking into a wry smile. “It was highly encouraged by Brian Van Gorder.”

Greene said that football involves so much more practice – bringing with it some redundancy - than most sports as opposed to games, keeping younger athletes engaged was often an issue. So a cheap shot at practice?

“That’ll get the intensity up,” Greene said. “I tell ya, it was like a bunch of convicts.”

He said the mesh fencing around the practice field wasn’t necessarily to hide strategic secrets, it was to hide the physical anarchy. If you thought David Pollack and Jon Stinchomb were in better shape than their position mates, there was a reason.

“Stinchcomb and Pollack fought every day in practice,” Greene said. “It got so bad that literally, Coach Richt would just run ‘em around the practice field. It was gonna happen, and Coach Richt would make ‘em just run laps around the practice field.”

Greene was recruited and signed by Donnan, and then redshirted in 2000. Donnan was fired and Richt was hired. Greene got the start over Cory Phillips – who saw plenty of playing time a year earlier when Quincy Carter was hurt – for the season opener against Arkansas State. Greene completed the first 11 passes of his college career en route to 285 yards and a 45-17 win.

Greene thought it was a pretty good performance, and actually looked forward to the first quarterbacks meeting and film study. And then he got a review sheet loaded with red check marks.

In that case, red wasn’t good, and it meant running gassers. In addition to improved conditioning, Greene got an early lesson on the importance of details – invisible to the average fan – in championship football. Greene got hammered, he remembered, for not properly running out his fakes on some plays.

“I had to run 18 of ‘em after practice,” Greene said. “Coach Richt talked about, ‘David, when you hand the ball off, you take five hard steps when you carry out your fake, because we’re not blocking the backside defensive end, he’s your man.

“ ‘If you take five hard steps, that guy just flat-foots. A lot of times, Musa Smith, he can cut it back and if that guy thinks you have the ball, he might not tackle Musa.’ And as we’re watching film, I would hand the ball off and take three hard steps and then kind of let up and coast on my last two.”

Richt pointed out the mistake over and over in that session: “If you would’ve done your job here, Musa may have scored a touchdown.”

He admitted such focus on details appeared to have waned in Richt’s later years, but the Georgia football bar remained raised. When it takes the next step, he’s not sure. Greene said Georgia has struggled to find its offensive identity the past few years, and still is in that mode, and was in that mode entering the Florida game a year ago.

He hopes things can repeat themselves.

“Going into Florida, we didn’t really know (what) our identity was,” he said. “And if y’all remember, about halftime of the game last year – y’all remember it? That second half, we found rhythm for the first time. And then we hit a streak, didn’t we? We played some great football going into that championship game.”