By: Drayton Hogarth

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

With college basketball well underway, teams all over the country are preparing to enter the conference portion of their schedule.

Many teams are still trying to find their identity after winding down the out of conference slate. One of those teams that is in need of a new identity is the Georgia Bulldogs under long time coach Mark Fox. The Bulldogs are as good as they are going to be under Coach Fox, and that isn’t good enough.

Entering his eighth season in Athens, Mark Fox was hired by former Georgia Athletic Director Damon Evans, after a successful run at Nevada. It was thought at the time to be an interesting hire, mostly due to geographical concerns.

In other words, would recruits know who Coach Fox is here in the southeast, and the home state of Georgia in particular. Fox has amassed a record of 134-107 so far. It isn’t so much just the lack of wins, Georgia has never been a great basketball power, but it is more than that.

It is how the team is losing that is so maddening. The Georgia sports information department, which does a fantastic job, likes to espouse the fact that Georgia has won twenty games three straight seasons under Coach Fox. While that used to be a staple of big time programs, in today’s schedules of teams playing 35 or more games, it does not hold the same merit that the 20 game plateau once did.

How Georgia is losing games is what can be so frustrating, the team has an amazing tendency to go into offensive droughts for multiple minutes at a time; seemingly at the most inopportune times.

The droughts are equal opportunity offenders. When Georgia is competing against a top ten team, such as earlier this year against Kansas, the team goes into a drought for virtually the entire first half, where Yante Maten, was the only player who was a constant threat to score for the Dawgs.

Or, the droughts will make an appearance against a team like Oakland, in Michigan, where Georgia was winning the game by double figures, only to turn around and go into the tank in the second half, being outscored by 14 in that time frame. It is not just a one year issue, it is one of the constants of the Georgia team under Mark Fox.

In addition to a lack of on the court performance, seeing the elite players from the state of Georgia almost all going elsewhere to play their collegiate ball is even more disappointing to Bulldog fans.

The talent has finally gotten to a competitive level at Georgia in the last couple of seasons, as Fox was intent upon not delving into the world of AAU recruiting early on in his Athens tenure. While Fox has changed his recruiting strategy, more needs to be done in the recruiting front.

The state of Georgia is one of the deepest basketball talent pools in the country. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at almost every program in the top ten and you will find a player from the state of Georgia. North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky, all have significant contributors on the team from the Peach state; not only this season, but for the last several seasons now.

A coaching change likely won’t be made very soon, and despite evidence that a change is needed, that could be a good thing. My reasoning is, it won’t be too much longer before there will be a new person in the Athletic Director’s chair.

Current athletic director Greg McGarity should be retiring soon, and the decision of who to hire as the new basketball coach should belong to the incoming athletic director, whoever that may be. Let’s hope it is one of his or her first orders of business.