To clean up an old expression, “Opinions are like [mouths,] everybody’s got one.” Some tend to make more sense than others, and some are paid more attention than others.

Take Mark Richt. He’s made it clear if you don’t have a background in football, he doesn’t put much stock in what you have to say. I guess I’m out of luck, because I wouldn’t know the difference between a game plan’s Xs and Os and those on a messy Valentine.

But I have been watching Georgia football for a few years, and I haven’t missed 10 minutes of a home game in the three seasons I’ve been here. And you know what? I don’t think I need to be down on the field to see that things aren’t exactly working out for us right now. Because brother, that’s abundantly clear from all the way up in the nosebleed section.

So while Coach Richt may not listen to me, I think I can cue him in to a little problem I see with his team.

First, a little background: I take a lot of ribbing from my friends because I have a policy of refusing to go downtown after a Georgia loss.

I’m sorry, I just don’t see any reason to celebrate when we get rolled by the Tide or chomped by the Gators. (Obviously I haven’t been going out too much this season.) But then recently, I realized I looked pretty stupid for staying home and moping after a loss. Why?

Because I heard from several people that half the football team was in Flanagan’s or Farenheit on Saturday night. And while I was angrily going to sleep, those players were apparently out spitting game as if they’d stomped the Gators instead of getting romped by them. Yeah, I know it probably wasn’t the whole team, but there were some big names in those bars.

And they weren’t the ones (read: just Cox, Moore, and Curran) who speak up and ask us not to blame their coaches for their poor performances.

Those are the leaders who make it easy for us to say, “Hey, they’re good kids in need of a good coach – fire Willie.” No, the players in those bars only speak up when they’re talking at their latest girl.

I know they’re college students too. I know they deserve to have fun like I do. But I haven’t been endowed with the responsibility that comes with signing those papers that make me a part of this storied program in need of an update. Those players chose not to live the life of an average student, and they need to start acting like it.

There are several reasons why we’re 4-4. You can blame the fact that Bobo’s weaknesses are no longer covered by the talents of Stafford and Moreno. You can blame the lack of emotion from players on the stone-faced expression of their coach, who belongs to the Keanu Reeves school of emotion, where you look the same whether we’re up by 40 points or down by 40 points. You can even say Richt should have fired Martinez awhile ago, instead of risking his 3-million-dollar contract to keep an old friend around one more year. But at the end of the day, Mark Richt is the same coach who had everyone in town clamoring to wash his feet for him not two years ago.

And that coach will look at his options at the end of the season, and he’ll make his decisions. My hope is that he’ll re-evaluate his recruiting.

Because those educated guessers at Rivals and Scout.com may have a funny little starring system, but in the end there isn’t a rating for motivation. And when players are tweeting about how many times a week they clean out a Waffle House, the player-populated dorms at ECV have lines of women coming in who aren’t there to bring textbooks over, and key players are celebrating their loss at a local bar?

Well, to this spectator that means it’s time to take a look at who you’re bringing in here to take hold of our legacy. And I’ll trade a three-star David Greene over five-star Matt Stafford any day.

-Marc McAfee is the online editor of The Red & Black.