Hey Jenny Slater.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I think I may have come up with an idea that might solve not only the continuing income disparities between whites and minorities in this country, but maybe — just maybe — racism as we know it.

In the grand scheme of things, this undertaking doesn’t even have to be that massive. We’re not talking, like, the New Deal or the Apollo project or anything like that. That said, it is gonna take some seed money. So step one is we line up an angel investor. Ideally this person would be an independently wealthy African-American person with broad appeal — Oprah’s the obvious place to start, but Will Smith, Robert L. Johnson, Beyoncé, they could be good candidates, too.

And with their initial investment, this pillar of the African-American community would start . . . a candy company. Again, nothing huge. Don’t need to create the Nestlé corporation from scratch. In fact, this candy company would only need to create one thing: chocolate bars.

So the company gets up and running with those chocolate bars, and hopefully, with the imprimatur of Oprah or whoever, it meets with some initial success. Then, once it’s been going strong for a few months, we’ve got the supply chain all ironed out, brand awareness is robust, we announce our first big nationwide marketing promotion. We tell the country that somewhere, in all those millions of chocolate bars we’re cranking out, we’ve hidden five golden tickets. And whoever finds one of those golden tickets gets a lifetime pass to use the N-word with impunity.

Instantly, you will see scores of white people bum rushing candy shops, supermarkets, convenience stores and bodegas across the country for even the slightest chance at getting one of those tickets — for, as Larry Wilmore’s (hilarious) set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the other night reminded us, few things on this earth bedevil the minds of my fellow crackers like the fact that black people can say the N-word and we can’t.

In no time at all, our little chocolate-bar concern will have become more profitable than Google. And for the price of 0.000002% of America’s white population being allowed to say the N-word, we’ll have enough money to rebuild our inner cities, open doors to a dizzying array of new educational opportunities, and give millions of minority kids a chance at a better future.

Hi, government of North Carolina. Long-time visitor (we used to go to Nags Head every summer when I was a littl’un), first-time caller. A question, if I may. So you’re telling me that in order for civil order to be maintained in your state, these people must be required to use the men’s room...

...while these individuals are directed to the ladies' room:

(If you’re playing along at home, the first group is actresses Candis Cayne, Jamie Clayton, Caroline Cossey, Laverne Cox, and Michelle Hendley, followed by ad spokesperson and youth activist Jazz Jennings and actress/singer Mya Taylor, all of whom were born dudes. The second group is writer/activist Chaz Bono, pole vaulter Balian Buschbaum, motivational speaker Buck Angel, Men’s Health cover model Aydian Dowling, actor Kingston Farady, fitness model Ben Melzer, and speaker Ryan Sallas — all born chicks.)

That doesn’t seem like a very good plan to me.

Ostensibly, the purpose of House Bill 2 is to protect restroom and locker-room users from invasions of privacy or sexual assaults. At least, that’s what the governor said when he signed it. Here’s the thing, though: Sexually assaulting someone in a bathroom is already illegal. (It is, right? Please tell me, North Carolina, that in your sudden burst of legislative urgency, you’ve at least made sure that base is covered.) Not only that, but the people committing those assaults aren’t transgender folks, they’re regular ol’ cisgender dudes. Oh, if only people would fight as hard to safeguard our potties and locker rooms from the Dennis Hasterts and Larry Craigs of the world as they are li’l Jazz Jennings, what a wonderful world this would be.

So HB2 isn’t going to make a lick of difference when it comes to the safety of cisgender women and children. Here’s what it will do, though: When a trans man who looks like Buck Angel walks into a women’s restroom, he’s going to make the women in there uncomfortable and fearful, quite possibly enough so to call the cops, and there’s a good chance trespassing or indecency charges are gonna get filed. And when a trans woman who looks like Laverne Cox walks into a men’s locker room, she’s going to get leers and catcalls, harassment that will only intensify when they ask her what she’s doing in there and she tells them she’s transgender. Maybe they call the cops, too; maybe they call her a freak and force her out themselves; maybe she gets raped.

That will be the ultimate legacy of the “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act.” Not that it made women and children more safe, but that it made transgender people less safe. (Considering how hard it is to make transgender folks even less safe than they are now, I guess that qualifies as an accomplishment.)

Against my better judgment, I’ll give the North Carolina legislature the benefit of the doubt and assume that endangering an entire group of citizens wasn’t their conscious intent with this law. But I refuse to believe that stigmatizing those citizens wasn’t, at the very least, a bonus benefit in the eyes of the people who voted for HB2. Because one very obvious result of this law is that people in North Carolina are going to be paying a lot more attention to who walks into which bathroom. And anyone who looks like they might be transgender — hell, anyone who doesn’t conform to certain standards of masculinity or femininity — stands to get scrutinized, called out, and humiliated. This is a very conscious attempt to make someone The Other; in our strange new post-Obergefell world, it is a way of salvaging part of the old hierarchy and putting certain people “in their place.” It is a way of saying, No matter what rights you might think you have, as far as we’re concerned, you’re still a freak.

So yes, Donald Trump would be a terrible president. And I don’t think I’m out of line in questioning the judgment of anyone who’d cast a non-ironic vote for him. As much as I might be tempted, though, I can’t automatically call those folks dumb, because at the very least, they appear to have outgamed the Deep Serious Thinkers in the Republican Party establishment. Trump Nation, in fact, has done what we idealistic liberals have been hoping they’d do for decades: They’ve figured the Republican Party out.

Since the “Reagan Democrats” put the exclamation point on the realignment of American politics in 1980 — and possibly even before that — liberals have been confounded by the fact that lower-income white voters in the “flyover” states so consistently “vote against their interests” by loyally supporting the GOP. How on earth, we’ve asked ourselves, could a blue-collar worker living in a trailer park possibly think that policies such as union-busting, Wall Street deregulation and capital-gains tax cuts are going to do him any good whatsoever? Or to ask the question another way, what’s the matter with Kansas?

Well, the Trump phenomenon is the sound of all those white voters saying to themselves, What’s the matter, indeed.

Granted, in more than a few places — including my childhood home of Radford, Virginia, sadly — it’s also the sound of people shouting racial slurs and photographers getting knocked to the ground. Not for one second am I going to deny that there are plenty of voters for whom racial demagoguery is their biggest attraction to the Trump campaign. Trump has played a very coy game with them, professing to want nothing to do with groups like the KKK while winking back at them juuuust enough to indicate, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.” For that reason alone, the Trump phenomenon can’t be underestimated, either as a political campaign or as a movement with the very real potential to create unsafe conditions for the populations it targets as The Other.

But neither do I think for one second that every Trump supporter is motivated solely by racism. If that was all it took for candidates to become as successful as Trump’s gotten, David Duke would still have a political career; at the very least, he’d have a better electoral won-loss record than 1–10. Trump’s guns haven’t just been trained on Mexicans and Muslims; they’ve also been trained on the Republican Party establishment, about whom Trump’s basically saying, They’ve been lying to you.

And on that, at least, he’s not wrong. For generations, the conservative movement has badgered us to take it on faith that lower taxes and less restrictive regulation will create greater prosperity for everyone, the working classes included. And for much of the last half-century, we’ve gone along with that. But it’s becoming apparent that when Republicans say “lower taxes,” they mainly mean “for the rich,” and when they say “less restrictive regulation,” they mainly mean “for massive corporations that may or may not give a rat’s ass about you, the American people.” The results have been predictable. Republicans may take credit for the boom of the Reagan years, but they were also in power when the housing bubble burst in 2008. They also controlled the House of Representatives for much of the recovery years, in which the unemployment rate and corporate profits improved but wages largely didn’t.

All along, the Republican establishment has been promising, “Stick with us, we’ll make you rich,” and they haven’t. So now the party base is holding them accountable. And for this, some of us want to call them stupid?

Not that Trump’s plan, to the extent that he has one, is any less sketchy than what the rest of the GOP has been peddling for years. According to the not-exactly-wild-eyed-liberal Tax Foundation, his tax plan would increase the deficit by more than ten trillion dollars, with most of the benefits still getting funneled to the top 1 percent. And yet even then, I can’t entirely blame the Republican base for flocking to Trump in droves. If one guy says a lot of things you really agree with but you find out he’s been lying to you the whole time, while a second guy also says a lot of those same things but claims to have no connection to the first guy — a statement the first guy is all to happy to confirm — you’re probably gonna feel more comfortable trusting the second guy, right? What have you got to lose — especially when the first guy is now calling you a “sucker” and a “sap”?

The obvious liberal response to this is, Well why don’t they just vote for Democrats then? Here’s the problem: The Democratic Party’s hands aren’t exactly clean, either. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress from 2007 to 2010 and the White House since 2009. The blame for stagnating wages rests partly on them, too. And many members of the Dems’ Washington leadership seem no less beguiled than the GOP by this persistent notion that a rising Dow Jones average or the words “Free Trade” automatically make everything OK. Unfortunately, part of the recent corporate resurgence has been fueled by a continuing effort to push down wages as much as possible, which means regular Americans don’t have any more money with which to fuel the economy by spending it on stuff. And whether it’s because of Republican strong-arming or their own blind faith in Wall Street, the Democrats haven’t been effective in curing that. To start pulling the Trump voters into their camp — or, hell, to keep from losing what used to be their own reliable voting blocs to Trump — they better start.

Yes, Trump Nation has a fringe that won’t fully be on their side unless they bring back segregated water fountains, and I’m perfectly fine with writing them off forever. But there are also a lot of average Joes who simply want to feel like they still have a shot at the Horatio Alger story, like they’re not being held down by elites with more money and power than they’ll ever see. If the Democrats can lift them up, those voters aren’t gonna care if African-Americans, Latinos and whoever else are rising alongside them. On the other hand, if liberals keep calling them stupid, they’re gonna continue to think Democrats are assholes.

We’ve been hoping for years that the Republican base would finally start noticing how little they were benefiting from their party loyalty and holding the GOP establishment accountable for its promises. Well, now it looks like a bunch of them have. But that alone isn’t going to bring them into the Democratic tent, whether the leader under that tent is Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or anyone else. And it’s certainly not going to happen if Democrats keep telling them they’re a bunch of morons. There’s a huge chunk of the American electorate that appears prepared to give the mainstream Republican Party the heave-ho, and this is how you’re gonna treat them?

Vicious primary campaigns are not really a new phenomenon. The Democrats went at each other with guns blazing in 1968, and the free-for-all that resulted at the convention in Chicago was, in retrospect, predictable. In 2000, of course, we had Karl Rove whispering to South Carolina that John McCain had an interracial bastard child.

But I don’t think there’s ever been anything like what’s going on in the Republicans right now. The party establishment is laying into Donald Trump with everything they’ve got. He’s a fraud, a charlatan,  an interloper paying lip service to Republican bona fides while not really believing in any of it. Their rhetoric has gotten to the point where Trump might as well be Bane, a false-populist supervillain who claims to be for The People but is really only out to set off a nuke in the heart of the conservative movement. It’s important that I specify “the conservative movement” rather than “the entire country” here; while there were any number of things National Review could’ve decried about Trump in the infamous “Against Trump” issue they put out back in January, their overarching concern was that Trump presented “a menace to American conservatism” who would “trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP.”

I cannot for the life of me figure out what they’re talking about. If the Republican establishment could take off their blinders long enough, they’d see Trump is a lot closer to their “broad ideological consensus” than they’d like to admit. He isn’t an impostor or a menace to American conservatism; he is American conservatism, or at least what American conservatism has turned itself into as of 2016.

I mean, has anyone actually noticed how little daylight there is between Trump and the rest of the GOP with respect to the issues — particularly the two candidates (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz) who have become the Great White-Enough Hopes for “saving” the party? Trump is avowedly pro-torture; so are Rubio and, whether he wants to admit it or not, Cruz. All three would rip up the no-nukes deal with Iran. They only disagree on defense and national security to the extent that they’ve been scrambling to one-up each other on who would bomb ISIS the hardest.

On domestic policy, Trump, Rubio, and Cruz are all pushing tax-cut plans that would overwhelmingly favor the rich while adding trillions to the deficit. They all pooh-pooh climate change; they’ve all vowed to defund Planned Parenthood. They all want to get rid of not only Common Core but the Department of Education entirely. They all insist Obama shouldn’t get to nominate anyone for the Supreme Court vacancy, and they’ve all promised they would nominate rock-ribbed conservatives. And all of them have vowed to eighty-six Obamacare without offering even the faintest whiff of a plan for what to put in its place. (Actually, that’s unfair to Trump, as getting rid of “the lines around the states” is way more concrete than anything Congress has proposed in the six years since Obamacare became law.)

And then there’s immigration: Trump, Rubio, and Cruz are all completely opposed to a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. And while National Review may have only just figured out that a U.S.-Mexico border wall is a fruitcake idea, Ted Cruz was pitching it when he first ran for Senate four years ago. Now Rubio has apparently signed on with it too.

Sure, Trump’s positions on issues such as abortion have been, to put it charitably, difficult to pin down. But the GOP establishment’s outrage over that looks rather less credible when they offer Marco Rubio as their model of consistency — a guy who put forth a reasonable plan for immigration reform, only to run away from it like a coward once he realized the conservative base might not support him for president. (Same deal with Mitt Romney, who was proud of his health-care reform record right up until he had to start running against Barack Obama.)

As for Trump’s barely disguised racism and xenophobia: Look, Republicans, I know nobody wants to admit to lingering racism in twenty-freaking-sixteen. Good on y’all for at least recognizing that much. But it’d be a lot easier to disavow Trump’s racist appeals if you hadn’t spent nearly half a century enjoying the electoral spoils of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Or if you weren’t still trying every legislative trick in the book to keep racial minorities from voting. A blog comment I saw last week sums it up in a single sentence: “The only difference between Trump and the others is that the others use a dog whistle, while Trump says eff that and just dangles a raw steak to get them to come.”

Even Trump’s “corruption of cultural standards,” as kvetched about by National Review, has long-standing precedents in the movement-conservative playbook. Or do they think it was classy for the American Spectator to spin fanciful yarns painting Bill Clinton as a hillbilly Pablo Escobar? Or, as we’ve discussed, for Dubya’s 2000 presidential campaign to tell everyone McCain had a dusky-skinned love child? Sure, Trump’s a misogynist to boot, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke “a slut” and “a prostitute.” Or remember Erick Erickson trying to play Captain Save ‘Em by disinviting Trump from his RedState shindig for being a dick to Megyn Kelly? Sure would’ve been nice if he’d listened to a little of that white-knight impulse before he suggested feminists all go home “to make sandwiches,” or that they were “too ugly to get a date.” (Or, hell, before he told Kelly herself that working moms “weren’t healthy for society”!)

Poor Victor Davis Hanson has been driven to his fainting couch by “a presidential candidate on a debate stage implying that his phallus was large.” No, that’s something only conservative pundits should be doing (sometimes even with the so-called liberal media’s willing assistance).

I could live a little better with the myths and the lies When the darkness broke in, I just broke down and cried — Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control” (1978)

As I get older, it’s no longer partying as much as it is tailgating your own funeral. — Kyle Kinane

Well, as much time as I’ve spent railing against it, it looks like the “Mark Richt Has Lost Control” meme might just sink this program after all. Only it’s not the players he’s lost control of, it’s the coaching staff.

Depending on whose side you take, the growing chaos in the Georgia football program is a result of either a) a brash outsider going out of his way to inflame tempers and make enemies or b) a moribund program stubbornly resisting the efforts of an energetic outsider to shake off old, ineffective ways and get the team over the hump. I’ll admit I fall a little closer to the “b” side, believing as I do that there was a lot that needed to be shaken up in the Georgia program and we do need to try some new things. Yes, Jeremy Pruitt may be a meathead and a loudmouth; however, if you’re going to disown the efforts of every loudmouthed meathead who’s ever held Georgia’s defensive coordinator, that means you get to flush Todd Grantham down the memory hole, but you’ll have to send Brian VanGorder with him.

But I’m not going to spend a lot of time picking sides as if this were some binary, either-or, Democrat-Republican sort of deal, because I just don’t have the energy. Right now, what I want more than anything is for Georgia to just broom the entire coaching staff and start with a clean slate.

* * *

If that sounds too drastic for you, ask yourself: What path can you draw out of this that leads to a better outcome? Here are the possibilities as I see them:

Richt keeps both Schottenheimer and Pruitt. Not going to happen. Every opinion I’ve read, even from those who are the most sanguine about Georgia’s prospects going forward, points to Pruitt being gone after this season.

Richt dumps Schottenheimer, keeps Pruitt. Same deal, though getting rid of Schottenheimer would be a definite plus. Unfortunately, the rift between Pruitt and Schottenheimer isn’t even the most significant in the program right now; by all accounts, Pruitt is on the outs with Richt and Greg McGarity, which is the primary reason he’ll be out of Athens before the year is out.

Richt dumps Pruitt, keeps Schottenheimer. This way lies madness. Pruitt may be a personality problem, and his Georgia tenure certainly hasn’t been perfect, but there is no conceivable metric by which one could portray his body of work as inferior to Schottenheimer’s. Firing the one guy who’s been aggressive about combating the good-enough-is-good-enough mentality in the Georgia football program lately, while keeping the architect of what is shaping up to be the Bulldogs’ most inept offense in decades, would bring a restless fan base to the point of open revolt.

Richt dumps both of them. The old “embattled coach cleans house” maneuver is like icing the kicker — something that keeps getting tried over and over again in spite of the fact that it hardly ever works. Can you name a coach who’s managed to fire both coordinators and stave off his firing by anything more than a year or two? Some coordinators may be dumb — I can name one right off the top of my head — but the good ones won’t be, and they’ll recognize an avoid-at-all-costs sinking ship when they see one.

And as attractive as the last option might be, it still saddles us with the person bearing primary responsibility for having allowed this season to devolve into its current dumpster-fire state — Mark Richt himself.

Even now, it pains me to even type those words, but it’s true. Why would you bring in someone whose most recent career stops were at Alabama and Florida State — winning national-title rings at both — in an effort to put a spark in an underachieving program, only to chafe at his personality later, as if you’d had no idea what you were getting? How on earth could someone with Richt’s reputation for QB development allow such a smoldering crater to develop at that position? And what on earth did he see in Brian Schottenheimer that made him think we should not only entrust our offense to the guy, but pay him $850,000 a year for the privilege?

I’m not gonna try and rewrite history here — when the Schottenheimer hire was first announced, I told people, “Doesn’t matter, all he has to do is call handoffs to Nick Chubb and we’ll be fine.” Deep down, though, I wondered why we would throw all that money to someone whose coaching résumé included all of two years at the college level, and who hadn’t done anything noteworthy in the pros, either, even by the notoriously conservative standards of NFL offenses. And who knows, maybe if Nick Chubb were still around (damn you to hell, Neyland turf), there’d still be some bloom on Schottenheimer’s rose — but even then, I doubt it. Remember, outside of Chubb’s 83-yard TD run against Alabama — our first legit opponent of the season, it turns out — he only managed 63 yards on 19 carries in that game (a 3.3 average), and what I’ve seen from our offensive line since then tells me that wouldn’t have been the last time our ground game got bottled up. And we still wouldn’t have a quarterback with the bare minimum of skills necessary to keep opposing defenses from cramming eight or nine guys in the box.

And now we are where we are. There are four games left in the regular season, and if you wrote the numbers 4, 3, 2, 1 and 0 on little scraps of paper and put them in a hat and told me to pick one out, I could make a case for us winning that many games no matter which number I picked. Could we have an undefeated November? Against a slate that’s a combined 17-16, sure. But we could also get punked by a Georgia Southern team that’s handled the transition to FBS ball better than anyone could’ve predicted. Hell, even as awful as Georgia Tech is, we could be so beaten down by failure and recrimination by the end of the season that we cough one up on the Flats. Nothing would surprise me at this point. When you don't care enough to expect anything, that'll happen.

* * *

Maybe that’s why, as rough as the past month has been, I’ve managed not to lose any sleep over a single game. But I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the one night I did: Nov. 2, 2002, the night after the Georgia-Florida game.

Part of it was that I’d gotten rill drunk watching the game at the Mellow Mushroom down the street from me in Birmingham, and while booze may help ease the pain of such a crushing loss, it still isn’t conducive to a good night’s sleep. But as I tossed and turned in bed, the Georgia-Florida game was all I had to think about. How could we have played so badly against a team that barely escaped Auburn and Kentucky and lost to Ole Miss? How did we let our dream season get taken to the brink by Ron Zook? After all those years of failure against Florida, how could we have taken such a perfect situation — undefeated, gunning for a national title, facing a Florida program as vulnerable as it’d been since before Spurrier came home — and squandered it like that?

From there, of course, we had the “Prayer on the Plains,” the 51-7 napalming of Georgia Tech, the drought-breaking SEC title win and the victory lap in the Sugar Bowl. Even stinging disappointment tends to get drowned out by commotion like that. Amidst that kind of euphoria, the Florida loss was simply a blip on the radar, an unfortunate stumble that still couldn’t derail Georgia on what appeared to be a road back to greatness. An outlier that couldn’t deny the larger trend.

Well, now we know: That loss was not a bug but a feature. On an annual basis, there would be a breakdown like that. Sometimes it would be a close loss to a mediocre team, like the ’02 Florida game had been. Sometimes it would be a blowout loss to an elite team, though one with which we still should’ve been competitive. (Sometimes, as with last year’s Florida game, the opponent would be mediocre and the margin would be huge.) But every year, at least once, there would be a loss that made us all wonder just what the hell the team was doing out there, what the coaches had been doing all week. That had us asking, How in the world could we have played like that? The question wasn’t would an inexplicable beatdown happen, it was when, and which team would do the honors. 

And it would happen no matter how good that year’s Georgia team was, or how good we thought it was. The 2004 team, losing at home to Tennessee the week after dealing a 29-point beatdown to LSU, the defending national champions. The 2007 squad, which won the Sugar Bowl but was down 28-0, at halftime, to Tennessee. The 2012 team that was five yards away from a national-title shot but 28 points away from beating South Carolina. Even when everything set up perfect, when the roster was stocked and the conference was wide-open, it would happen.

That was when everything was perfect. When it wasn’t perfect, well . . . when the star receiver was suspended for selling his jersey or the quarterback didn’t live up to his billing or none of the quarterbacks lived up to their billing, it would happen repeatedly and sink the entire season. On both a micro in-game level and a macro level, our program responds to fantastic situations and terrible ones with equal ineptitude. Either way, the response from the fan base is the same: a shrug, a sigh and Well, maybe next year will set up better, and it always does, until it doesn’t.

* * *

When I was little, like three or four years old, I had this recurring dream that I was riding in the car with my mom and little sister. We were in our Chevy Malibu station wagon with blue vinyl seats, mom in the driver’s seat, Ann and I in our car seats in back, heading toward I-81 on Tyler Road right outside of Radford, Va. — that’s how vivid this dream still is. We’d be driving down the road, and I’d look down at a book or a toy or something, or over at my sister, and when I looked back up the driver’s seat would be empty. And as the car continued motoring down the road, I’d look out the side window and see my mom, walking back the way we’d come on the other side of the highway, and she’d be waving at us like everything was fine.

That’s what it would feel like every time Georgia had one of those out-of-nowhere, inexplicable, failure-in-every-last-phase-of-the-game losses: Who’s driving this car? Why are they strolling around over there like everything’s fine?

The saving grace of that dream was that it didn’t damage my relationship with my mom. (Seriously, I don’t know why I kept having it. My relationship with her was fine then and it’s great now.) And the saving grace of those disastrous Georgia losses was that we managed to not go in the tank for an entire season afterward; for the most part, they were fairly isolated.

Now, though, it doesn’t feel like the coaches have lost control of an individual, isolated game. It feels like there’s no one at the wheel of the program. Obviously, I haven’t always agreed with Richt’s decisions or his logic, sometimes even when we’ve been winning, but at least I could usually feel assured that he was operating in a logical, steady fashion. It doesn’t feel that way now, though. The inexplicable Schottenheimer hire; the worsening staff discord; the Wheel O’ Quarterbacks that has left us wondering from week to week which QB will be starting, which one will be benched, and which one will be punting — they all speak to a head guy who’s no longer operating out of logic but out of desperation, throwing stuff at the wall in the hopes that something’ll stick. Under any coach, that would be frustrating. Under Mark Richt, who up until now has been more likely to take flak for being too boring and set in his ways, it’s downright terrifying.

I don’t think that’s being overdramatic, because the chaos festering in the program right now has the potential to reverberate long after this season’s over. Suppose both Schottenheimer and Pruitt are shown the door after this season. Not only will you have potential replacements wondering if Georgia is a morass they want to take a chance on, you’ll have recruits wondering the same thing. And if the Bulldogs’ rivals smell blood in the water, that’s how dispiriting losses turn into lengthy streaks that handcuff a program as severely as any NCAA penalty. When Phil Fulmer was ousted in Knoxville, we all gloated that Mark Richt was the driving force in making it happen. Now we’re wondering if Jim McElwain or Butch Jones might be doing it to Richt. (Or if Nick Saban already has.)

Unloading a couple coordinators isn’t going to stop that from happening if everyone knows we’re just marking time until the ax falls on the coach’s head. Between the losses on the field and the resentment in the front office, there’s just too much poison in this well. I never thought I’d have to say this — and I certainly hoped I wouldn’t — but at this point only a complete housecleaning is going to take care of it. And that includes Mark Richt.

* * *

And yet.

And yet, I still can’t bring myself to utter the words Fire Mark Richt. That just doesn’t seem natural for a guy who’s won more games than any Georgia coach other than Vince Dooley and a higher winning percentage than any of them since the 1920s. It may have been a long time ago, but that 2002 season still means something; it meant that after the embarrassment of the Goff years and the frustration of the Donnan ones, Georgia was still a program people had to care about. As bad as things are right now, they don’t erase our debt to Richt for making all that happen.

My ideal scenario for the last month of the 2015 regular season — and yes, all this may sound horribly Pollyannaish and naive, just bear with me — is for Georgia to beat Kentucky, Auburn, Georgia Southern and Georgia Tech, earn a bid to the Music City Bowl or something, and then, after accepting that bid, Richt announces he’s retiring. The team sends him out with one last win (his 146th), we hire Justin Fuente from Memphis, and life goes on. Because I have no desire to punish Mark Richt or embarrass him. It’s become a cliché to call him “a good man,” but some clichés become clichés because they’re true. There is no reason for any Georgia fan to want him to go out anything less than a winner.

And I’m damn sure not going to root for the team to lose just because it might hasten his departure. Even if you think the coaches don’t deserve any better than that, the players do. The coaches will be fine whatever happens; if Richt got fired tomorrow, his most pressing dilemma would be whether to deposit his $800,000 buyout directly into an IRA or cash it out into hundreds and roll around in it on his bed. But the players are just playing the hand they’ve been dealt. Continued losses aren’t going to do them any good. Wins — and the confidence that the fan base is still behind them — will.

But even with all that said, we’re in a tailspin now, and I don’t think Richt has what it takes to pull us out of it. Yes, we bounced back from a bad stretch in 2006, from a couple miserable seasons in 2009 and ’10 — but the problem is that even after 2006, there was a 2009 and ’10, and even after we thought we’d bounced back from those years, there's now a ’15. I’m not one of those blinkered fans who thinks that Georgia is entitled to win every single game they play 77-0, but I don’t want to be stuck in this cycle anymore. And if it’s on its third revolution, yes, it’s a cycle — one entrenched enough that, even if we bang out four or five more wins this season, I’ll still be waiting for it to come back around again a few years from now. Maybe sooner.