Think about the layers of people that take care of everything you need to do your job. Everyone from the IT staff keeping the bits flowing to the assistant who takes care of office supplies and keeps the coffee stocked to the HVAC guys who are outside working on the broken heat pump. Every second you have to spend thinking about these things is time spent away from what makes you productive and valuable to your company. If your company doesn’t have people and systems in place to abstract away those functions, I probably don’t have to tell you how frustrated you are about the constant interruptions and crap you have to deal with before you can even do what it is you do.

We’re trained to think of management in top-down terms: orders and direction are given and followed, policies are imposed, and so on. But the best managers get that one of their most important roles is to create those abstractions and make them as transparent as possible. If a salesperson is constantly dealing with IT issues, management has failed.

So it is with athletics or any profession, and Mark Richt is just another guy with a job. So it makes sense that his manager, Greg McGarity, is helping Richt to clear some of those distractions away. Whether you disagree with Richt’s assessment that “we are very close,” the one takeaway from yesterday’s season-ending press conference was that Richt would be more available to “study the game of football.”

“I’m just spending less time messing around with things that Greg wants to be able to help take off my plate from an administrative point of view,” Richt said. “Things are being put in place that are going to help free me up to spend more time doing the things that I love the most, which is study the game of football and be an expert and be on the cutting edge.”

It might seem obvious to the point of “what took you so long,” but there are reasons why coaches sometimes get bogged down in the peripheral stuff. Going back to the role of management, what’s changed in that area over the past year? We know that this move was undertaken with the cooperation of McGarity, and we don’t know what level of administrative support was available from McGarity’s predecessor.

It can also be a difficult balance because those non-football areas can derail what you’re trying to accomplish on the field. Take the emphasis of this offseason: the restructuring of the conditioning program is the one major change made since the 2010 season. The emphasis on toughness and attitude has nothing to do with schemes and cutting-edge football, but Georgia has decided that they can’t win without it. It’s a similar story for academics. They’re in good hands with Dr. Eason, but it’s an area that can sink your program if it gets out of control with a head coach whose head is mostly in the Xs and Os. Richt will still need to have clear communication with these areas while he studies the game, and that’s something that a good manager like McGarity will have to keep an eye on.

Is this a good or even an important move? I don’t know. On one hand, I don’t see the shuffling of some administrative duties as key to the survivial of Richt’s program as some much-needed upgrades on the conditioning side. On the other hand, Georgia, especially on offense, isn’t exactly what you’d call a cutting-edge program. Teams like Stanford showed that you can still win, and win big, with a conventional I-formation and pro-style offense, but Georgia’s offense heavy on sprint draws and play action isn’t actively being copied in what has become a very copycat business. If it takes some reorganization for Richt to have the time to study those areas and make the changes that are implied by that reflection, at least that’s taken care of now.