Gator Country

Top three reasons Florida fans can mock Georgia.

1)Jim Harrick.

2) Ray Goff.

3)Todd McCorkle.

Harrick was the basketball coach who led the Bulldogs to NCAA shame a few years ago. Goff was the former Dogs’ quarterback and coach who served as Steve Spurrier’s whipping boy and is a big reason UGA is 2-15 against the Gators since 1990. McCorkle was Georgia’s women’s golf coach for the past seven years.

You’ve probably never heard of him until he resigned after an internal school investigation last week revealed complaints from players concerning inappropriate sexual comments and jokes. McCorkle reportedly made comments about bras and underwear. There was one alleged instance of inappropriate contact, but the big no-no was when the 44-year-old former Arizona coach supposedly showed a sexually explicit Paris Hilton video to members of the team.

His punishment: a round or two of anti-harassment training and a month without pay. Faced with that option, McCorkle resigned. Get this: He’s still employed by the athletic department in an “undisclosed job.”

One question: What does it take to get fired at the University of Georgia?

He shouldn’t be coaching. They got that part right, which is better than North Carolina, which has tolerated allegations of boorish behavior by women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance far too long. But why keep McCorkle on the payroll?

What kind of a message does that send? You can’t harass our athletes, but it’s OK to try your sophomoric shtick on the rest of the campus?

For this, McCorkle apologized. Sort of.

“I have learned through this experience that I must be 100 percent professional at all times,” McCorkle said in a statement, noting that “life is full of learning experiences.”

Really? So where did he learn his social skills from? A Girls Gone Wild video.

Georgia’s athletic administration can’t he held entirely accountable for the actions of a single coach, but in this case someone probably should have known better. McCorkle is married to Jenna Daniels, a 29-year-old pro golfer.

The 15-year age difference may raise concern, but even more troubling is that McCorkle coached Daniels at Arizona. Both were adults, but questions of when their relationship began should have been addressed. Were they? Probably not. Not with three Pac-10 titles and a national championship on the resume.

Hindsight is clear. Revisionist history is not. A lot of schools would have hired McCorkle. Georgia can be forgiven for that. A lot of schools would have fired McCorkle. For that, Georgia has no excuse.

About the author

Mike Hodge

Mike is an award-winning writer who won Florida Press Club awards for sports column writing and sports news reporting while at the Ocala Star-Banner. He is now the editor of the Gator Country Magazine, an excellent publication in its own right!

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