Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Greg McGarity is the Michael Scott of athletic directing


The Office icon was a humorously ineffective leader that managed to stumble around his own blunders long enough to sell ads for NBC. The head honcho of Butts-Mehre's blunders aren't funny. At all. More like a really bad record that skips to its worst part over and over again.

I think HooDawg and Blutarsky are right, In these days and times with UGA Athletics there's so much to live for and also be enormously frustrated about that it's confusing. It's frustrating. It's sad and it's depressing.

It's confusing.

McGarity should bear the brunt of that ball of emotions. His hiring record is not up to SEC standards and he's about to hire yet another gymnastics coach (and likely a baseball coach as well). His public relations skills are worse than early pre-WWI editions of socialist propaganda, mainly because they lack the public censorship necessary to drive the points home. Which is to say that once he realizes he's disenfranchised a large enough percentage of donors he'll sit down with someone at the AJC and clumsily pull a shiny quarter out of his pocket.


The problem is that not enough people are calling McGarity on it. Bloggers and active social media users can vent, and the media will reference our discontent enough to get that quarter back out of Gregory's dockers, but for the most part I get the sense that there's a wait and see philosophy amongst the higher ups.

Maybe everyone's hoping Kirby can break the ceiling again; if the Sky Suite wallets are happy the Scranton office of Dunder Mifflin can keep on selling paper. Or maybe McGarity has compromising pictures of somebody. If so, I wish said somebody would find a way to burn that evidence so that the rest of us can move on.

I don't know what exactly it is that keeps Greg from forced retirement. However, I do know that, administratively speaking, leadership is lacking in UGA's athletic office. McGairty has proven he's not Jeremy Foley, as we once wished when he was hired to replace Damon Evans. In fact, our AD is so far from that level of competence it leads me to believe that McGarity spent all his time during Florida's hey-days making paper clip chains and jamming the Xerox machine...again.

UGA alumni and supporters can continue to turn their heads, but eventually that practice leads to trouble.


Kirby is recruiting at a level that could break that ceiling. Even if he does there's no amount of McGarity propaganda that can convince me that his "search firm" made the decision in Kirby's favor. Should we let this man continue to make important decisions about the other coaching hires, the facilities, whether or not two trash receptacles are enough for a gameday weekend in the Fall, just how full the UGAA ca$h coffers should be, and whether or not he should be so bold and brazen to...I don't know...pick up the phone and call Greg Sankey to say something along the lines of "Hey! Enough with the noon games goddammit!!"

I was lucky enough to attend the annual Terry College of Business Gala the other night. As we waited for friends to arrive we noticed many faces of UGA prominence, in the business, administrative and athletic fields. (The wife even finally got a picture with Sean Bailey!)

My point is that you tend to take notice of people of importance as soon as they enter a room. There's a shift in the air movement, and if you miss that sign you surely notice other heads turning. "Hey, there's Dan Cathy. Yep, that's President Morehead."

Then...there he was. He slipped in practically unnoticed all the way through check in and was putting on his name badge. "Hmmph, there's McGarity."

We need a leader for an athletic director. Instead we have a limp dish rag. And the only ones laughing at these jokes are our rivals.