Mike Bobo continuing to adapt entering another season as Georgia OC

ATHENS, Ga. — Mike Bobo is entering the second season of his second stint as Georgia’s offensive coordinator. Coaching his 25th consecutive season in some capacity, Bobo’s been around the block in the game of football, but things have changed a time or two along the way as well.

Expectations are big for Bobo’s Bulldog offense this season. With quarterback Carson Beck returning for another season as the starter and plenty of pieces around him, excitement abounds. Georgia finished No. 5 nationally in 2023 for both scoring (40.1 points per game) and total offense (496.5 yards per game) and quite possibly could exceed those totals in both categories this year. That doesn’t come without adaptation.

“Me and Coach T-Rob (Travaris Robinson) were talking about it earlier about back in the day the game may have been a little bit simpler. It was a little more physical, but you’ve got to adapt,” Bobo said. “The game is played in space nowadays. I don’t want to adapt so much that we lose our physicality as an offense and what this program’s built on and what Coach Smart’s built it on: it’s toughness and physical on offense.”

Bobo certainly found a balancing act to those two factors last season. He couldn’t call the same offense as he did during his first stint as Georgia’s offensive coordinator when the likes of Matthew Stafford, Knowshon Moreno and AJ Green were his key playmakers. It also looked different than his record-setting 2014 unit that featured Aaron Murray, Todd Gurley, Nick Chubb and Chris Conley – among other weapons. Using the skillset of Beck, Brock Bowers, Ladd McConkey and Georgia’s other pass catchers, Bobo found a rhythm as the season went along. Motions and tempo became more important. Still, especially down the stretch, the Bulldogs were able to run the ball with a pair of veteran running backs – Kendall Milton and Daijun Edwards.

“You look at all the different things that he does here, we didn’t have all those motions (at South Carolina),” Robinson said when asked about the differences in Bobo from the time they spent together at South Carolina (2016-2020) to now, reuniting in Athens. “We had some of the fast huddle and different things like that but we didn’t have all these speed motions and all these different things that we’ve got.”

“It’s a lot of moving parts and it’s very important to do that on offense in today’s football because of all the different things a defense is trying to do to you,” he continued. “The key to the drill when you are on offense is to get the defense to talk, trying to get them to make a mistake. Well, the easiest way to do that is going fast and motioning and we do that better than anybody in the country.”

Bobo said he still seeks out help from others. His season as an analyst under Todd Monken was big in expanding his view on football. He’s got former Clemson offensive coordinator Brandon Streeter on staff, and Darrell Dickey, an offensive coordinator of 15 years and head coach at North Texas from 1998 to 2006, was around the building last season. Then of course there’s old influences from Bobo’s past like Mark Richt, Jim Donnan and his own father who he still talks football with. It’s his way of living up to what he tells his plays: always be learning.

“We’ve all got friends in this business that we talk to on a regular basis that are coaching and trying to stay fresh and new with how you do things. Football’s football. You know, we’re really running very similar plays that we ran 27 years ago when I started coaching. It might be just out of different formations and different personnel and using different guys,” Bobo said. “I rely on coaches that have coached me that have a lot of experience … I tell the players all the time: ‘You’ve never arrived. You’re always learning.’ And that goes for us as coaches, too. We’re always trying to find new ways to do things — not necessarily new, but ways to do things better where we can be efficient on offense.”

Georgia kicks off its season on August 31st with a matchup against Clemson (12:00 p.m. ET, ABC). The Bulldogs and Tigers have won four of the last eight national championships and both enter 2024 ranked in the top-15 of the preseason Coaches Poll.