Mark it down – it doesn’t happen often: the Bulldog Nation is in accord about not one but two points on the hiring of Jeremy Pruitt as Georgia’s defensive coordinator.

1 – It’s a fantastic hire. Everyone – from the players to the media to the crustiest “FIRE THEM ALL” fans – seems to love this news. About the only thing you can say to temper the enthusiasm is that expectations on the defense will be unfairly high right away.

2 – It’s too good to be true. Even after you parse the relationships involved, note the terms of the contract, and account for the fact that Mark Richt is a pretty good guy to work for, there’s near-universal bewilderment that the first-year coordinator of the national champion would make a lateral move to an 8-5 program stuck right in the middle of the nation’s toughest conference. Yes, the hot girl just dumped the quarterback and would rather be with you. Georgia fans, used to being played for salary increases by unserious candidates, couldn’t believe it until they saw the press conference.

But here we are. It’s official. Pruitt was introduced on Wednesday as the new defensive coordinator at an event that will leave Georgia fans with a smile that will last until September. The quotes are pure red meat to fans. It doesn’t sound as if it’ll take much to get the defensive players to buy in.

A lot of fans insitinctivly went for Kirby Smart when the position came open. I get the appeal, but I wasn’t as sold on the preference as much as a lot of people seemed to be. One of the concerns about Smart was the fact that he hadn’t proven himself apart from Saban. Pruitt had the opportunity to do that last year at FSU. With Jimbo Fisher’s background on offense, Pruitt’s defense was built in his image. While the personnel and opponents will be different in Athens, we at least have a better understanding with Pruitt of how he’ll go about things.

Pruitt will have a chance right away to make his mark on the Georgia program. Though Mark Richt left the door open for Georgia’s two remaining defensive position coaches to remain on the staff, it appears as if Kirk Olivadotti and Chris Wilson will take positions elsewhere. Those moves make Pruitt, in his second day on the job, the senior man on Georgia’s defensive staff. Pruitt will oversee defensive backs, so that leaves openings on the defensive line and at linebacker. With a 3-4 scheme, you’d expect one defensive line coach and then two linebackers coaches (for inside and outside.)

It didn’t take long for the giddiness over the arrival of Pruitt to turn to a more sober realization that the work starts right away. All of the advantages Richt counted on with the continuity he stressed when it looked as if the staff would remain intact are long gone, though at least the basic scheme won’t be changing much. The ability to assemble an ideal staff is a tremendous opportunity (it’s more or less what FSU had to do last year.) But with less than three weeks until Signing Day, there’s also a small bit of urgency to bring in a group of coaches that will not only bring about improvement on the defense but also finish the job of recruiting. Pruitt sounded as if he was already quite familiar with Georgia’s recruiting board, and he’ll take some time evaluating the current list of offers. This is a fairly light weekend for official visits, but things really ramp up over the next two weeks. We should expect to have a staff in place and on the ground by then.

• Georgia will remain a 3-4 defense. Pruitt noted the need to be multiple and versatile based on the varied offenses they’d face and the need to get the best people on the field. Different alignments and personnel groups out of the base 3-4 were common under Grantham as well.
• Though Pruitt offered to help with Georgia’s struggling special teams, Richt guessed that the staff would add someone with “a string special teams background.” That wouldn’t be a prerequisite for the job, but now with three openings Pruitt and Richt will have a little more flexibility to add a position coach with some special teams expertise.
• “If you can’t execute it, we’re not going to call it.”
• “We want be sound, we want to be aggressive, but we want to make the other team earn it.”
• “We’re gonna be simple enough where you’ll be able to turn it loose and play football.”

Only a few weeks ago, fans were not in a very good place after an 8-5 season. Sure, there were injuries to consider, and everyone expected that a new and inexperienced defense would struggle. It helps that those 8 wins included the opponents they did. But the whole “continuity” theme seemed to be stretching it, and it was hard to get excited about more of the same on defense when so many little things were slipping. The universal praise of Pruitt’s arrival seems to have jolted not only the fans but also the players out of their postseason doldrums. That excitement will have to turn into a great deal of hard work and tough decisions over the next seven months, but the first step has been taken, and it’s on very solid ground.

As first reported by ESPN on Sunday afternoon, Georgia defensive coordinator Todd Grantham is leaving the program after four seasons to take the same position with Bobby Petrino’s new Louisville staff. You can almost hear the collective shrug of the shoulders from the Bulldog Nation.

Grantham was hired for the 2010 season to turn around a defense that had finished 63rd in the nation in scoring defense in 2009 and 38th in total defense. Georgia reached out to Grantham for his NFL experience and his knowledge of the 3-4 scheme that was coming back in style thanks to Alabama’s ascent.

The 2010 season was a transition year, and the Dawgs didn’t quite have all of the pieces to implement the 3-4 yet. Grantham won fans over with a confident and aggressive tone even as the Dawgs started 1-4 and finished with the only losing record posted by a Mark Richt team. The development of Justin Houston into one of the nation’s top pass rush threats showed the promise of the new scheme.

Grantham also began hitting the recruiting trail hard in 2010, forming relationships that would bear fruit with several key defensive signings in the 2011 “Dream Team” class. Most importantly for Grantham, that class included JUCO defensive lineman John Jenkins. Jenkins was a prototype nose guard for the 3-4 and would anchor the interior of the defense for his two seasons in Athens. With a year of experience in the system and more pieces in place, the 2011 defense finished #5 in the nation in total defense and helped lead the team to the SEC East title. Jarvis Jones became an All-American outside linebacker, and Georgia’s defense was among the ten best in takeaways. After allowing 80 points in the first two games, the Dawgs only allowed more than 20 points once over the rest of the 2011 regular season.

The return of key draft-eligible underclassmen for 2012 sent expectations through the roof, and Grantham received a hefty extension heading into the season. That heralded defense failed to materialize thanks to a slew of off-season incidents that left defensive starters suspended through, in some cases, the first four games of the season. As a result, the Dawgs gave up at least 20 points in each of their first seven games with the exception of a dominant performance against Vanderbilt. Georgia survived a shootout with Tennessee, got embarrassed at South Carolina, and narrowly escaped at Kentucky.

It took a passionate appeal from senior safety Shawn Williams to turn around the under-performing defense. Georgia held opponents to an average of 8.6 points per game over the final five regular season games, including a shutout of Auburn and a six-takeaway, nine-point effort against Florida. Grantham’s defense had come into its own, and Georgia went from a midseason flop to a national title contender.

But as impressively as the regular seasons ended, the 2011 and 2012 postseasons weren’t kind to Grantham’s defenses. The 2011 defense faded in the second half of losses to LSU and Michigan State. In 2012 the defense yielded an average of 294 rushing yards to Alabama and Nebraska. These difficulties with a loaded roster against good opponents were enough to plant the seeds of doubt that turned into quite a bit of discontent in 2013.

Georgia had some issues with injuries and suspensions on defense in 2013, but the wholesale inexperience of the unit was the big story. There were new starters at nearly every position, and several freshmen saw starts and significant minutes out of necessity. The defense struggled from start to finish, and Grantham – right or wrong – took the heat. The defense generated alarmingly few takeaways, struggled when put on the field after a “quick change” situation like a turnover, and gave up several memorable long conversions. Fundamentals like tackling were inconsistent, and signs of improvement throughout the year were sporadic.

From the start there were questions raised about the complexity of Grantham’s scheme. NFL coaches have much more time to work with players than college coaches. That became less of an issue with the more veteran defenses in 2011 and 2012, but confusion reigned in 2013. Defenders began to hear from alums in the NFL about less-complex playbooks at the next level. The team struggled to get lined up, blown assignments were common, and timeouts were spent at key moments.

Following the season Mark Richt cited the inexperience of the defensive roster and stressed the benefits of “continuity.” He had faith that another year of development under a stable staff would yield improvement in 2014.

With the departure of half of the defensive staff in the past week, that continuity is out the window. Even if the rest of the staff is retained, three of the four defensive coaches will be in their first or second year with the program.

Since the eventual hire is rarely on the lists of candidates that everyone comes up with (no, Bud Foster or Ed Orgeron will not be Georgia’s defensive coordinator), we won’t try our hand at speculation. There are a few things to think about, though:

• Scrap the 3-4? Grantham’s results with the 3-4 were mixed. (To be correct, Georgia’s defense was multiple and often used five defensive backs due to the number of opponents running spread offenses.) At the same time, Richt is counting on the experience of the past season paying off as young players develop. Do you look for someone with 3-4 experience who might do a better job relating it to college players, or do you take the hit and bring in a new scheme? With what’s at stake in 2014, I can’t see Richt writing off another transition year.
• What about the rest of the staff? The new defensive coordinator will likely have the opportunity to build his staff, but should the two remaining position coaches be retained? The defensive line was one of the strong points of the 2013 defense, and first-year line coach Chris Wilson got positive reviews. He might even be a candidate for the coordinator position. Football aside, it would suck to see Olivadotti let go just as his family begins to see light at the end of the tunnel.
• Special teams? Again, new arrivals on the staff offer the potential for new outlooks on Georgia’s under-performing special teams units. What can new blood do in those areas?
• How soon? Signing Day is just a little over three weeks away. Georgia’s new defensive staff will have to shore up current commitments and continue to the work to close on several important uncommitted prospects. The sooner that work can begin, the better.

Georgia defensive backs coach Scott Lakatos has resigned, citing “personal reasons.” Lakatos intends on coaching elsewhere next season, so hopefully those personal issues can be worked out in the meantime. We wish him great success and luck wherever he ends up.

Lakatos came to Georgia during the defensive staff reorganization in 2010. Hiring a northeastern coach with few connections to the Georgia area was a head-scratcher for Georgia fans, but we soon learned of the connection between Lakatos and new defensive coordinator Todd Grantham. It’s tough to separate the secondary from the entire defense for evaluation, but Lakatos helped continue what has become a golden age of Georgia defensive backs. Even with a good deal of attrition, the unit has produced several NFL players. There was a step back in 2013 of course, but injuries and suspensions to a young group made consistency difficult.

Lakatos states that “there’s no story here,” but there might be one if we step back and look at the entire staff. Lakatos’s personal issues, whatever they are (and we can leave it at that), are serious enough to make him step away from a fairly stable staff and take on the uncertainty of a job search and move. The Olivadotti family has faced their own trial over the past few years. Thankfully there is wonderful news to report on that front, but anyone who has faced a similar ordeal knows how life gets turned upside-down. You saw the emotional strain get to Mark Richt after the LSU game in the aftermath of Paul Oliver’s death. To paraphrase Bull Durham, we’re dealing with a lot of stuff here.

Hardly anyone knows the extent to which these serious events distracted the coaches or impacted their ability to do their jobs, but I wouldn’t blame any of them if it did. These jobs are demanding, stressful, and require a lot of time outside of 9-to-5. I hope even the most passionate fan can appreciate that football becomes a secondary priority when someone or a family member is going through a serious life event. So of the three defensive position coaches, you had a new defensive line coach and two others going through significant personal battles. That’s not to lay the performance of the 2013 defense on distracted coaches, but it’s not the recipe you’d follow for a cohesive and focused group.

The search to replace Lakatos will also be an interesting story. How much input is Grantham allowed in the decision? Certainly you want the position coaches on the same page with the coordinator, but Lakatos was hired almost solely on the recommendation of Grantham. While Grantham might not be as bulletproof as he was when he arrived, he’s still the coordinator with a very clear vision of what he wants his defense to be. If Grantham is working the phones with “NFL guys”, he might be taking the lead in the search. That would give us a hint as to the influence of Grantham within the program four years in, and it would also do a lot to squash persistent rumors about Grantham’s future with the program.

You can campaign all you want for the first official polls to be released mid-season, but the positioning for the 2014 season started last night:

• CBS Sports: first guess at a preseason top 25
• ESPN: Schlabach’s way-too-early preseason top 25

The consensus is already building and the narratives are already forming.

(Both of those polls have Georgia around 10 or 11. With the returning talent on offense, a year’s growth by the defense, and a more favorable schedule, that seems like a good starting point.)