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As Georgia prepares, this week, to travel to Tuscaloosa, Mark Richt has made an interesting decision. For the first time in his time as Georgia's head coach, Richt has completely closed practice. The question, of course, is why?

Is he worried that the all-seeing eye of Nick Saban will find a way to steal his game plan? Is this a clever way of making excuses for UGA's loss to South Carolina? Has all of the talk of Belichik's dirty deeds gotten to him? Is he just trying to instill in his players an "us against the world" mentality?

Or is he just paranoid?The Capstone Report, calls the decision cynical:


Georgia Sports Blog, as one might expect, has a more optimistic take:


I say the answer's just not that simple. Most likely, the answer is some odd combination of all of those factors. As what is probably Georgia's biggest game to date, Richt almost certainly has some aces up his sleeve that we haven't seen yet.

His comments seem to suggest that he thinks that South Carolina knew a little too much, and he'd be stupid if he didn't try to keep that from happening this week. If he's really paranoid, he might be doing this to try to isolate rats within his own program.

I'm sure Richt also realizes the psychological impact this will have on the players, the media impact, and I don't think we can discount the fact that he and many others seem to impute a lot of malice to Saban's actions. Bottom line, though, is that this is a big game for both squads and both Richt and Saban are both good enough coaches that they don't need to cheat to win.