Watch The WNBA, Y'All.

What we now think of as organized professional sports in North America (baseball excepted) began largely with at least some tenuous collegiate affiliation. *I use "official" in the following because history is a little murky on this stuff but these are consensus college-vs-college first match-ups and do not include prior intramural or informal games, etc.*: All of these are the first "formally recorded" in their respective sports: The first "official" American football game was between Princeton and Rutgers on November 6, 1869. The first "official" hockey game was played between members of the Victoria Skating Club, which included many McGill University students, on March 3, 1875. The first "official" men's basketball game was played between Hamline and the School of Agriculture (affiliated with the University of Minnesota) on February 9, 1895.

And the first "official" women's basketball game was Stanford vs. Cal at The Armory in San Francisco. The date was April 4, 1896.

Which is to say: if someone tells you they don't follow women's basketball because it lacks the historical gravitas and lineage of its male counterpart, you can tell them to fuck right off.

Even if you're the most cursory sports fan, you undoubtedly caught Sports Center highlights from the Final Four of this year's Women's NCAA Basketball Tournament. At the very least, you saw clips of: the all-time behemoth UCONN Huskies going down in overtime to Notre Dame.  Mississippi State blitzing past an incredible Louisville squad, also in overtime. And the absolutely incendiary final minutes of the Championship Game; especially Arike Ogunbowale's insane buzzer beater to clinch the title for Muffet McGraw's Irish squad.

This shit was straight-up electric. It was the hair-raising and gasp-inducing reason we watch sports in the first place. We had apex players going outside their minds even by their own ridiculous standards. We had unlikely saviors perpetrating subtle brilliance. We had ecstasy and heartbreak and the sheer wonder of a beautiful game played at the highest possible level.

In the women's pro game, we've had an equally explosive run over the past few seasons. People talk about how the recent Cavs/Warriors feud in the last three NBA Finals has echoed the Lakers/Celtics rivalry that sustained and grew the league before Jordan came along and turned basketball into a global phenomenon and the NBA into a ratings juggernaut. The epic WNBA Sparks vs. Lynx Finals the past two seasons has been every bit the captivating clash of those NBA battles. Two teams absolutely stacked with legendary talents have waged epic battles and compiled a truckload of incredible moments. From Maya Moore to Sylvia Fowles to Lindsay Whalen to Nneka Oguwumike to Candace Parker to Kristi Tolliver, the WNBA Finals has been chock-full of badasses. It has been some of the most compelling television of any kind I've watched over the past couple of years.

Which is to say: If someone tells you the don't like women's basketball because the storylines and stars aren't compelling enough, you can tell them to fuck right off.

Do you like basketball? Do you like good basketball? Do you enjoy players filling the wings on the break and crisp passing and beautifully designed half-court sets and immaculate shooting and crafty handles and defenses rotating on a string? Do you enjoy personality and joy and verve and hustle and pure improvisational artistry? Do you really really love a monstrous dunk thrown down with emphatic sauce and malice? Yeah, women's hoops has you covered and then some.

Which is to say: If someone tells you they don't like women's basketball because they don't think "those girls" can play with the same athleticism, or that they like the men's game better because it's played more "above the rim": you can tell them to fuck right off.

If they insist on arguing, tell them to go talk that shit to Sue Bird or Candace Parker or Diana Taurasi or Chiney Ogumwike or Angel McCoughtry or Brittney Griner. Tell them you'll wait. Then laugh at them when they come back.

 (Brief aside: the NBA playoffs are rolling right now, and they are spectacular and please don't think I'm writing this to denigrate the NBA, I fucking love the NBA so much, but ALSO ALSO ALSO AND THIS IS SO GREAT AND WONDERFUL AND IMPORTANT AND AWESOME: THE WNBA SEASON TIPS ON MAY 18!!!!!!!!!!!!)

In a recent press conference, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver (who by extension also kind of controls the WNBA as they operate under the same auspices) had some thoughts about the problems facing the women's pro game. 

Silver floated the possibility of shifting the WNBA season to coincide with the NBA and collegiate basketball seasons. The incomparable Katie Barnes clapped back in style: 

"Would having the WNBA’s season run during the fall and winter help improve the league’s profitability? That’s a question NBA commissioner Adam Silver says he contemplates, according to an interview Friday on ESPN’s “Get Up.”
“It’s been harder to get people to come to the games,” Silver said. “It may be because the games are in the summer. One of the things we’ve talked about is do we need to shift to the so-called more natural basketball season sort of in the fall and winter?”
It’s not a new thought. Traditionally the idea goes as follows: Summer is for swimming and flip flops; it’s for running outside, not lacing up high tops or sitting in dark arenas. And there’s some truth to that argument.
But the WNBA would need to vastly restructure its compensation agreements with players for this thought to ever gain traction."

Then Silver stated his concerns that not enough young women were watching the league, and thus the next generation were not being inspired to keep balling. 

Former WNBA MVP and multi-year All Star Elena Delle Donne clapped back in style on Twitter:

 

Silver, who I think has by-and-large done well after taking over for David Stern, really fucked up here. This is supposed to be the most progressive, welcoming sports league on earth, but he royally bricked this one. The primary argument is that the NBA wants to grow the popularity of the women's game, but can't invest the advertising revenue without an assured return on investment, but can't get a return without growing the audience and putting eyeballs on the TV and people in the seats in arenas, but can't invest the money because there aren't eyeballs and seats already invested ... 

He's created a sort of misogynistic ouroboros here. The league won't spend money to grow the women's game, and then expresses concern over the lack of growth thereof. It is dumb and ridiculous and disgusting. 

But, if you're reading this, there is a mutually beneficial solution. We don't have to wait for an onslaught of advertising or promotion to prompt us. If you weren't in already, let me tell you: there has never been a better possible moment than right now to get full-tilt invested in the WNBA. You want legends; historical Titans and Goddesses who have traced and defined the history of the league? Cool: Taurasi, Moore, MccCoughtry and Parker are still out here ballin'.  

You want up and coming geniuses who are defining and redefining the game? Let me direct your attention to Alisha Gray, Breanna Stewart, Layshia Clarendon, and a score of others.

You wanna get in on the ground floor of some spectacular and brand-new pro basketball careers? The most insanely stacked draft class possibly in the history of the game just entered the league. Remember that very very recent Final Four I mentioned above?  You wanna see a bunch of those Badass Women Of The Week (TM "Burn It All Down') take a leap to the next level? You can. They're here right now. 

The WNBA is, at this moment, absolutely loaded with mind-boggling talent. No matter who you're inclined to cheer for (and if you don't have a team by geographic affiliation, trust me one will stick out that you fall in love with anyway just from watching enough) there is AT LEAST one player per squad that will make you jump off your damn couch three times a game by doing something beyond the bounds of what us mere humans are capable of. This league is so overflowing with absolute transcendence at this precise moment. We are at the fulcrum of something indescribably beautiful and perfect and it will grab you by the nerve endings and make you a better and more joyous human just for watching if you let it.

And you can experience all of this.

If you live in a city with a team (or close enough), go see a game. Hell, go see ten games. Go get a season ticket package if you have the coin. If not, tune in on TV and online. If we put enough collective eyes on this wonderful league playing this beautiful game at a breathtaking and exhilarating level, the NBA will be forced to put the financial and promotional muscle behind it that is long overdue. WNBA League Pass is cheap (like, under $20) and will give you every game streaming live, up to four simultaneously in split-screen, with stats breakdowns and the whole analytical works on top of the actual broadcast. Even if you don't want to pay for that, there are a handful of TV broadcasts and about 30 games streaming absolutely free on Twitter.  

If you want to watch genius and athleticism and grace and brilliance and power, if you want to watch history and the future running the floor together on the break, if you want to revel in brilliance, there has never been a better time than right damn now. Watch the WNBA, y'all. Hop on this train with us. I promise you, you're gonna love this journey.

Thank You, Jamie Cherry.

One of the first things my fiancee and I did when I moved to Chapel Hill in late January of 2015 was purchase a season ticket package for the remaining games of the Carolina Women's Basketball team. My last visit before moving here to join her, we'd gone to Carmichael to watch the Heels destroy App State, and left the arena utterly smitten with the team. We've had season tickets every year since. During that time, we've screamed our throats raw; we have cheered, cried, and laughed. We have left the gym in bouncing, giddy ecstasy after a win. We have left hanging our heads in silence when the game went otherwise. In a house of myriad sports rooting interests, we have loved this team with more collective passion and ferocity than anything else.

The common thread through this journey, aside from The Goddess Sylvia Hatchell and some of the other mainstays on the coaching staff, has been Jamie Cherry, the only player thus far whose entire Carolina career we've watched unfold from the bleachers. These four years have been so incredibly special, and a lot of that has to do with the joy of watching #10 perform miracles.

Did we need a huge shot in a critical moment, something to swing the momentum of a half or beat a buzzer? Watch Jamie coming up the court. Maybe she runs a dribble hand off and gets the ball back in the corner after a few passes tilt the defense. Maybe she barrels into the lane, an undersized dynamo cutting through the teeth of much bigger defenders, twisting and darting impossibly to the rim for the And-1. Or maybe she just stops at the top of the key and drains a casually vicious three right in some poor defender's mug. She was absolutely fearless, always. No moment was too big. Jamie Cherry, more often than not, was going to get the bucket we needed. Then she'd streak back down the court on defense, making the "three" sign with both hands. In those moments (and there were many; so, so many), she was a compact ball of exuberance, defiance, and joy. She'd be screaming. She'd be laughing. 

We also watched her grow into a superb floor general. Her freshman year, she was backing up the brilliant Latifah Coleman (now the team's video coordinator), and would sometimes push the envelope with some ill-advised passes and poor decisions. When Sylvia handed her the keys to the offense before her sophomore season, Jamie took them with aplomb. Witnessing her court vision evolve in real time and in person was a pure delight. She started seeing everything at half-speed, using her speed and athleticism the way Tar Heel point guards have since time immemorial. Suddenly, she was whipping entry passes in transition that connected where they had been picked off before. In the half court, she was probing defenses for a sliver of daylight and then swinging to an open shooter or slotting a pass into the post with killer accuracy. And always moving, cutting, working to adjust and calibrate the offense and find the little things off-ball to maximize every possession's efficacy.

Defensively, she was always a little better than you'd think if you hadn't watched nearly every minute of her career. She picked plenty of pockets with her gunslinger-quick hands and jumped passing lanes with brilliant anticipation. When a switch occurred on a pcik'n'roll and she wound up guarding an opposing player with a foot of height and 50 pounds on her, she just bodied up and got in their grill. Good luck getting Jamie Cherry to give an inch to anyone, ever.

This above all: Jamie never stopped running. I mean that almost literally, y'all. Her tenure at Carolina coincided with an absolutely brutal, multi-season rash of injuries crippling the team's depth. Compounding the issue were a handful of transfers precipitated by the guillotine of NCAA sanctions (the blade of which never actually fell) stemming from the academic scandal. The Heels' bench was paper thin, with virtually no one else capable of being a successful primary ball handler. So Jamie played and played and ran and ran. Through twisted ankles and torqued knees and aches and sprains and a busted nose that required a Rip-Hamilton-esque face mask for a stretch, she simply did not quit. She hit the deck for every loose ball, she pinballed off waves of bigger defenders in the paint, she slid into position to contest and drew charges. She took a preposterous amount of abuse and just kept on playing her ass off. Take out her freshman season as a bench player, and she averaged a staggering 36.4 minutes a game over the remainder of her career. No rest, no breaks, all motor and fury and passion all the time always. Jamie Cherry is a Terminator. If you dropped an ACME safe on her like she was Wile E. Coyote or ran over her with a semi truck, she'd just shrug it off and call for the ball. Then she'd dribble up court, set the offense, and more likely than not, make the perfect pass or hit the shot.

Jamie's Senior Night ended in a loss to Syracuse. It wasn't what anyone wanted, and certainly not the Carmichael farewell she deserved, but basketball is like that sometimes. As she left that court for the last time, we watched her hunched over, head down, sobbing as sophomore Olivia Smith wrapped her in a hug. But then, the last instant before they hit the tunnel, Jaime's head lifted, and she raised a fist into the air. It was both a goodbye and a statement off accomplishment. Everything she'd worked for, all the sweat and grind and drills and sprints and shots and passes. Not just at Carolina, but her whole life. A million bounces of a ball, a million jumpers, a million hours of training and film sessions. Jamie gave so much of her young life to hoops, and we were fortunate enough to watch her incredible run at UNC. She's not done with anything, obviously. That last Senior Night moment, hand raised and head high, was just as much a beginning as an ending. Basketball is probably behind her, at least as a player. (Though who knows, maybe she'll wind up coaching or scouting somewhere down the line.) In the swath of history and the wider world, Jamie Cherry's life is just beginning. Whatever awaits her, she will doubtless meet it with the same ferocity and brilliance and joy she brought to every game.

For four years, we were lucky enough to watch the unstoppable force that is Jamie Cherry run the floor and lead this team. There's a saying they have in Chapel Hill: "Playing at Carolina is an honor, winning at Carolina is a tradition." I'd alter that slightly just for this moment. Watching Jamie Cherry play at Carolina has been an honor, and losing our damn minds when she hit yet another preposterous three has been a truly wondrous and beautiful tradition. Thank you, Jamie. We love you. Good luck, God speed, and Go Heels.  

Bleak House: On The NBA Season So Far.

We're a week out from the NBA's All Star Game, and I feel like this season has been an oddly bleak and perplexing one so far. A few caveats: Georgia's football season was so magical, right up until that 'Bama TD pass in overtime of the National Championship Game,  that I was a little more disconnected from The Association than usual this fall. (There is only so much emotional and mental sports investment in a body, y'all, and the Dawgs took about 95% of mine.) The point being: I kind of stumbled into the NBA season more in media res than is normal for me. Couple that with the Hawks rightfully gunning for a tank job in the last season before draft lottery reform (and thus disconnecting me from my immediate rooting interest), and my favorite sport and league in the world became a little alien. I've watched plenty of games, read all the blogs and media I usually do, listened to all the NBA podcasts I always do. Even so, this season's rhythms have felt strange. Maybe it's that I haven't internalized the pulse just yet, but it also feels like an echocardiogram of this year would show more than a few anomalies.  It's still beating its joyful beat, but the NBA's heart also seems like it's showing some mitral valve prolapse here, a little cardiomyopathy there.

It started opening night, when Gordon Hayward went down with a truly gruesome injury 5 minutes into what looked like a very promising Celtics season. To be fair, the Celtics have been incredible anyway. Kyrie Irving has been out of his damn mind, my beloved Alfred Joel Horford has brought his usual understated brilliance, and Boston has mostly shredded their competition. Still, it felt cruel to witness the full-power C's for such a short blip of time.

Then there's the mess in Philly with Markelle Fultz. Trusting The Process has given basketball fans the unmitigated glee of Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid working their magic ... but. It's one thing for a #1 overall draft pick do be a bust; highly-touted players falling short of expectations is something we've seen plenty of times. This is different. Fultz, apparently, cannot shoot a basketball. He has a mysterious injury that has received conflicting diagnoses from multiple sources, and right now no one seems to know if he'll ever play even a minute in the NBA. It is an exceedingly strange development that has disappeared into a season where "strange" has become the new status quo.

Speaking of bizarre injuries, what the actual hell is going on with Kawhi Leonard and the Spurs? The franchise that has arguably been the model for excellence, consistency, and adaptability in all of professional sports for the past 15 years has an actual problem on its hands. When will Kawhi see the floor again? Unclear. Is he, or someone in his camp, disgruntled with how San Antonio is managing the situation or vice versa? Unclear. Is there a rift between the organization and its anointed franchise player despite said organization absolutely never having rifts of any kind? Also, still, unclear.  The Spurs still boast a 35-21 record, right on pace for a home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs, but things in San Antonio seem, for once, disjointed. When the cohesion of this team looks to be slipping, even if only in outward appearance, you know you're through the NBA looking glass.

We have to talk about the injuries, too. Boogie Cousins was finally on his way. After taking a metric ton of critical shit (some deserved, most not) for never reaching the playoffs despite being one of the league's elite talents, his Pelicans squad were looking like they might not just make the postseason, but give any potential opponents real fits. Boogie, the Brow, and Jrue Holiday (whose game I have always adored, sometimes irrationally) were a triumvirate that ran somewhat counter to the NBA's current ethos. They were stretching and spacing but also bludgeoning and hammering. The perfect miasma of a good-to-great combo guard and two bigs who played stretch-4 and -5 while retaining enough old-school Twin Towers elements to flummox any defense. Now Cousins is out for the year and change with an injury that has a history of limiting and/or destroying careers, specifically those of NBA big men.

Then there's Kristaps Porzingis, who came down on The Greek Freak's foot and will not be returning to the court any time soon. No fan base, especially one as ride-or-die as New York's, should have to go through what Knicks fans have suffered in the Dolan era. Decades of incompetence punctuated by the myriad "almosts" of the Ewing era; Stat punching the fire extinguisher; Phil Jackson's calamitous return. It's been an abject disaster for a long, long time in NYC. And they finally had a glimmer of hope in a transcendent young talent. And that hope was decimated in the space of a few seconds and one fluke play.

It's so fucking cruel and so fucking horrible. For the Knicks and the Pelicans and every basketball fan on earth. Fucking cruel and fucking horrible. All of it.

And then the trade deadline happened. 

January-February Cavs panic has been a tradition ever since LeBron came back to Cleveland. It's just a thing we do and then laugh at ourselves later when 'Bron drags another squad back to the Finals. Every year, James and his running mates slog through a malaise and then turn on the jets and decimate everything in their path. This year was the craziest tightrope they've ever walked, and I'm not sure they found their balance again this time. The avalanche of moves Cleveland made did help. It made the team younger and better, and they kept the Brooklyn pick. But damn, it feels like King James might have finally met a situation he can't overcome with his unique and incredible brilliance.

Hanging over all of this is the disappointment Adam Silver has been this season. Silver was hailed as a visionary almost from jump when he took over from David Stern; a man who understood basketball's place in both American and global culture. He was going to shepherd the NBA into the new reality of streaming rights, accessibility, and social activism. He seemed to be analogous to the current Pope Francis in a way, open to dialogue and intent on growing the game while respecting and nurturing the needs and aims of the men who play it. And yet, in a league that has been both historically and recently progressive in its public-facing values, Silver has pulled in the reins at some truly odd inflection points. He issued a statement against kneeling for the National Anthem, despite knowing full well why it was being done in the NFL and also that his league's players and fans would likely have supported what that kneeling represents. On a far, far more trivial note, he also failed to comprehend that the maximum delight fans could mine from the school-yard pick 'em format of this year's All Star Game could only be delivered by a live, televised broadcast of the team selections. The legalized gambling initiative is nice and all, but Silver has still floundered at some key spots. 

I have faith that both Silver and the league will get there. I truly do. And this season has not been wholly devoid of things to love and revere and adore and have a good laugh over. Sure, the Warriors still look like an indestructible juggernaut, but Good Gawd: Portland and Denver and Minnesota and Miami and Detroit (especially post-Griffin-trade) and Washington (post-John-Wall-yet-another-cruel-injury-but-they're-fun-anyway) and new-look-Big-3 OKC the Oladipo-powered Pacers and in particular Houston have all been incredibly fun to watch this year. I am delighted to have been wrong about how CP3's game would integrate into the Rockets' offense. Watching that team is pure joy.

This world is so fucked up right now. This country, especially. And the game I hold dearest, even with some of its most prominent voices addressing that fucked-up-ness and advocating for change, still seems to be mirroring both the country and the larger world in which it is played.  

It is still, it is always, NBA basketball, and there is not a sports thing on this earth that makes me happier. But it's been a janky, confusing, and somewhat depressing season, and even with the joy and the highlights and everything else to love about this game, it's been strange and disquieting this year. And I can't help but hope. I hope things will be less cruel, less disjointed, less strange in the future. I hope things will maybe get a little better for everyone.

What This Feels Like

I am the only Southerner in my family. My mom is from Duluth, Minnesota; dad hails from Cumberland, Wisconsin. They moved south to Atlanta in the 70s and, thankfully, they never left. I was born in 1982 and grew up in a house of somewhat muddled sports rooting interests. Mom and dad still loved the teams of their youth, but they had also embraced the ones who now played in their newly adopted back yard. There was some immediate connection to the Braves, since dad grew rooting for them when they called Milwaukee home, and followed them to Atlanta not too long after they moved. The Falcons and Hawks were, well, they were there, and in the era before cable packages and streaming, you kind of had to latch on to the local teams if you wanted to watch sports with any regularity. Anyway, I grew up with some residual family love for the Vikings and Packers and Twins, but mom and dad also raised me pretty firmly on the Atlanta pro teams. College Football, that was a different story.

My father to this day still carries some Gophers and Badgers pride, but he also fell in love with the whole ethos of College Football Down South. (I'll say right now that it does not "just mean more" and every eye roll tossed in the direction of Southerners who get puffy in the chest about this is not entirely undeserved. But there is something unique and sacred about fall Saturdays where I'm from. It's something to do with religion and regional sensibilities and no small amount of bullshit, but it is most definitely a very real and powerful thing that hangs in the air and grabs you by the throat and fills an impressionable youth up with reverence and joy.) So dad got into Georgia Tech since they were based in Atlanta, but also Ole Miss and South Carolina in addition to his Big 10 roots.

I had to find the Dawgs on my own.

Born two years after their last National Championship and barely cognizant of the larger world when Vince Dooley left the head coaching seat at UGA, my earliest memories of Georgia football are a hazy mix of pretty-good-to-somewhat-indifferent seasons. But I loved everything about the Bulldogs immediately. The red and black, the hedges at Sanford Stadium, the fact that they were the namesake university of my home state. Maybe more resonant than anything was the legend of Herschel Walker. Herschel is still the God-King of all UGA alums, but my Midwestern family also adored him for the years he spent wrecking shop running the ball for the Minnesota Vikings, so the connection was doubly deepened. Somehow, the history and deep love of those early 80s teams sank in bone-deep, enough to sustain it through years of Joe Cox, etc. In a world filled with team after team of abject mediocrity (Braves, Falcons) and too-close heartbreak (the transcendent 'Nique-era Hawks), the Dawgs were the one sports thing I didn't share with anyone else in my family. They were my own little world; a love of my birthplace that I could feel and share with other Georgians, but not my own kith and kin. It wasn't a treasured secret exactly, but it was a touchstone to something deep and personal that came out of the red Georgia clay and got inside my soul.

Far From Home, Remembering Larry Munson.

Amanda Mull recently wrote a BEAUTIFUL PIECE about finding a Georgia bar in New York City. A lot of it deals with finding "home" in a place where you can't imagine anything close existing. I went to college at a tiny school in Minnesota (Shouts to Carleton, go Knights!) and spent the three years after graduation living in Minneapolis. There wasn't a Georgia bar there, but I briefly converted one table of one bar into a facsimile on November 20, 2011. Liquor Lyles sits on Hennepin Avenue in the Uptown Triangle. It was not a place we frequented much, since there were plenty of bars in Uptown and a lot of them were a lot closer to where we all lived, but me and a few Carleton alums had decided to pub crawl that night, so we were there when I saw the news. It was my turn to get the next round of beers, and I was at the bar when it flashed across the ESPN ticker on the TV: Larry Munson had passed away. I immediately tacked a round of Jack Daniels onto the order, and brought everything back to our table. I then tried to explain, with tears in my eyes, what had happened and why it mattered so much. In many ways, Larry was Georgia football. Dawgs fans refer to a number of significant moments in the program's history by Munson's radio calls. "My God, a freshman!" ... "Run, Lindsay, Run" ... "The Hobnail Boot Game". We remember things through his lens, his words, his eccentric and perfect sense of the moment. I completely failed to articulate any of that to my friends, but somehow they understood anyway. Bless them, they got it, even if the particulars eluded them. A million miles from home, with my friends who couldn't have given a damn about college football, we raised our glasses and slammed shots down for a legend. I've thought about Larry Munson a lot watching this Georgia season. I don't know what his calls would have been for the Tennessee game or the SEC Championship or Sony Michel's OT touchdown in the Rose Bowl, but I know they would have been perfect. It's a damn shame he's not here to see it.

Mama Called. Twice.

I'll raise my hand and admit it: I was not overly keen on the Kirby Smart hire. When Georgia fired Mark Richt, I understood the move, but the justifications didn't make me any less sad to see him cut loose. Directly after his termination, our long-time coach went back to his alma mater, where he just finished up an extremely Richt season by leading a kick-ass, fun as hell Miami team to a less than brilliant finish. Georgia brought in alum (and then-Alabama Defensive Coordinator) Kirby Smart to take the reins. Ever since Nick Saban got the Tide rolling again to an absurdly consistent level of joyless dominance, programs in the SEC have hired what Spencer Hall refers to as "Nick Saban's Large Adult Sons", a crop of former 'Bama assistants whom they hoped would bring some of the winning magic in Tuscaloosa to their schools. It hasn't gone well. At all. Yet somehow, Georgia managed to get the only one of that group who was worth anything. (Though, in grudging fairness, Will Muschamp appears to have turned his second shot at an HC gig into something decent and moving in a positive direction at South Carolina.)

Kirby Smart has turned Georgia into 'Bama East in a remarkably short amount of time. You can look at the insane recruiting classes he's already pulling in, or the cultural shift in the whole operation, or this magical season in particular, but by any measure the Dawgs are ahead of schedule. Like Dante in "Clerks", we're not even supposed to be here today. But we are. 

Lightning In A Mason Jar.

You could back a dump truck of sports writing cliches up to this Georgia season and just pour the whole thing out. The seniors, at no small risk to their future pro careers, came back for unfinished business. The plucky freshman QB who wasn't even supposed to be starting came into his own. The bespectacled folk hero kicker knocked 'em home when we most needed it. The two hackneyed phrases that keep sticking in my mind are these:

"You can't make this stuff up."

"This is like something from a movie."

Both are true this year. You can make this stuff up and it is out of a movie. But it's a particular type of movie. Not just a movie, not even just a sports movie, but specifically a sports movie whose target demographic is between five and twelve years of age.

Think of a kid drawing a spaceship for a second. Is that child drawing just a few lasers on the thing? No, they're drawing a spaceship with ALL OF THE LASERS. It looks absurd there on the paper, but much of the beauty of children's stock-and-trade, which is wonder and imagination, lies in the hyperbole. That's why when they make sports movies marketed to kids, it can't ever be just "oh a good, fun team had a good, fun season." The protagonists have to beat the most dominant, most evil team in the finale. They have to have the craziest, most improbable season and last game. They have to break records and make history. It has to be the first of something ever. It has to be the best ever. That's what makes it special and great and magical. And that's been Georgia football in 2017.

It wasn't just that we played in the hallowed shadow of Notre Dame, it's that we'd never played there before. And then we invaded South Bend and beat the Irish on their turf. It's not that we went out and beat all our traditional rivals, it's that we completely decimated them. (We emptied an entire closet full of Hobnail Boots on Tennessee's head in Knoxville, y'all.) All those heroic movie teams have to have their moment of adversity, and that was the first Auburn game. The Tigers flat-out smoked us. It was brutal to watch. But then came the poetic hitch: plenty of one-loss teams have won National Titles, but how many got to avenge that solitary L head-to-head in the same season and on a tremendously important stage? Georgia did that. They did it with that true freshman QB and those running backs who came back even though they easily could have gone pro and the God of Thunder named Roquan Smith stacking fools up and wrecking the best laid plans of all comers' offenses and Hot Rod booting the hell out of the ball. And they did it with Kirby Smart, the one apple who somehow fell close enough to the Saban coaching tree to be ruthless and brilliant, but far enough away to maintain some joy and personality and reckless glee as he does his job. (More about this from Will Leitch HERE.)

Let's take one more moment to think about the Rose Bowl, the most perfect exemplar of this kids movie out-sized narrative imaginable. In any other circumstance, neither Georgia or Oklahoma would even have been in Pasadena.  Because of conference affiliations, non-B1G and Pac 12 schools literally have to make the Playoff in a year where the Rose Bowl has fallen into a Playoff spot in the New Years Six rotation, then get seeded into that particular game to play in College Football's most historically prestigious event. But we got there. Both schools had only played in the event once before. Even more unbelievably, despite being about as Blue-Blood as you can get in college football, they had somehow never played each other even once. This despite Georgia launching a football program in 1892 and Oklahoma in 1895.

Then the actual game happened. This was overkill, even going by the "kids sports movie" narrative. It couldn't just be these two improbable teams meeting for the first time in the most prestigious and beautiful stadium in the game. It had to be the highest scoring, longest field goal, biggest comeback, first ever overtime game in the history of the Rose Bowl. Every conceivable record was broken under that perfect sunset and in the shadow of those picturesque mountains. And when Sony Michel took that direct snap out of the Wild Dawg formation and Jake Fromm sprung him with that block ... I lost my mind. I think everyone watching did, even those with no loyalties at stake. By any measure, this was one of the greatest college football games ever played. It doesn't matter if you're a Dawg or a Sooner or a nondenominational viewer.  Years from now, people will be talking about what we watched on New Years Day, 2018.

Love And Basketball.
 
I moved to Chapel Hill for my fiancee. Aggie hails form a family of die-hard North Carolina fans, and she couldn't bear to leave this place that I've now grown to love deeply and fiercely. Honestly, though I've only been a handful of times for games, it's a lot like Athens here, y'all. We made a deal when I moved in: I embrace UNC hoops, she embraces UGA football. (The first year of this arrangement, Carolina went 11-1 and came within a botched onside kick officiating call of knocking off Clemson in the ACC Title Game. Georgia had an underwhelming season and fired Mark Richt. So, you know, that went well.) Anyway, I've run the full gamut of emotions with the Tar Heels in a very short time. I watched Villanova's Kris Jenkins bury the dagger jumper against the Heels in the NCAA Championship game in 2016, just after Marcus Paige rose up through traffic and hit one of the most insane shots I've ever seen. I cried. I felt desolate. I kept thinking of Aggie's father who, like me, married into UNC fandom. After Carolina took a crushing loss to Marquette in the 1977 Title Game, Eli reportedly turned to her mother Susan and asked: "Does it always hurt this much?" Susan's reply: "No, honey, sometimes it hurts much worse than this." Incidentally, that game took place in Atlanta. A year later, I watched Joel Berry and company cut the nets down, as absolutely overjoyed as a person can be. This was special. In between 2016's misery and 2017's ecstacy, I watched the Falcons blow the 28-3 lead in the Super Bowl, another crushing defeat in a long sad history of Georgia sports heartbreak. (Also incidentally, both the 2016 Carolina loss and that Super Bowl were in NRG Stadium, which is cursed and should be destroyed.)

I mention all this to bring up the superstitions Aggie and her family have built up around Tar Heel basketball, and how resonant they've been watching Georgia this year. Before Carolina won the Title last year, they played Indiana in a regular season game. We'd been out running errands and stopped to pick up take out on our way home. When we turned the game on, the Heels were up big. Then things started going wrong. By the end, they had utterly imploded. Aggie didn't watch the next three games, because if your team fails when you start watching, you have to look away until they can win again.

We're getting married on the beach in April, so this past fall we took a trip down there to meet with vendors and so on. We got back late Saturday night and turned on the Georgia/Mississippi State game. The Dawgs were up 14-0 when we flipped on the TV. The first play we watched, Jake Fromm threw a dart over the middle to D'Andre Swift, who promptly fumbled the ball back to Mississippi State. Aggie's head snapped around, the superstition kicking in: "Turn it off right now. You know I'm right." We did. And the Dawgs whooped Clanga's ass for the remainder of the game.


Another superstition: ironing during games is good luck. Eli and Aggie have both saved some ironing for particularly important Saturdays this season, and it has obviously helped. (PS - Eli's family contains plenty of Dawg fans, so the whole cross-pollination of fandom thing is working out well.)

Parades I Hope We Don't Need.

We have one more game to play, and it's as loaded with those same kids sports movie narratives as all the rest of the season. Alabama, college football's evil empire of soulless dominance, is waiting. Here come more first time ever's, and more gotta-beat-the-best-most-evil-team-to-win moments. Stop me if you've heard this before, but no former Nick Saban assistant has ever beaten beaten him head-to-head as a head coach. Furthermore, we have the weight of the 2012 SEC Championship on us, when we lost to 'Bama by coming up 5 yards short in one of the most dramatic games I've ever seen. That game was played in the Falcons' stadium in Atlanta. This one will be too. On top of all that is something that just hit me the other day: The Crimson Tide began the year by knocking FSU's heralded starting quarterback out for the year in the season's opening game. Georgia also lost their QB in game 1. FSU cratered. The Dawgs transcended to this improbable date with destiny. All season long, Dawg fans have referred to it as the Revenge Tour. Every major rival, be it Florida or Tennessee or Georgia Tech or (eventually in Round 2) Auburn, we've smoked the teams that have historically stood in our way. Now we get 'Bama. Not only did they obliterate us on our home field in 2015, but that 2012 game was an existential and program-defining loss. It got Mark Richt fired. It broke our hearts. Five. Friggin'. Yards. Short. And it wasn't losing the game itself; not really. It was knowing that Notre Dame was waiting, and knowing that had we somehow managed to win, we would have destroyed the Irish almost as thoroughly as Alabama did. And we would have won the National Championship.  

But it didn't happen, and so here we are now. And I have one ask; for myself and all the other Dawg fans out there. Whatever happens, remember this season. Remember this moment, with the Rose Bowl just behind us and the possibility of Monday still ahead and undecided. SETH EMERSON and WILL LEITCH have both made cases about this already. They rightly implore us to remember that in sports, we're always one bad bounce or fluke play away from misery. So we should treasure what we have right here and now.

A few weeks ago, the WAITIN' SINCE LAST SATURDAY PODCAST compared this Georgia football season to the 1991 Braves. While Georgia didn't suddenly climb out of the basement like that team did, they have done something truly remarkable and special this season. I've been thinking about that comparison a lot, not just for the aptness of it (and hopefully it won't have the same ending), but for what happened afterwards. The Braves lost the '91 World Series, one of the best sporting events I've ever seen, in a heartbreaking game seven. When they flew home, we threw them a parade. Mom pulled me and some friends out of school to attend. We lost, but that team had given us so much joy and hope and Atlanta's teams had collectively been so awful that the whole city turned out just to thank them for being special and magical and getting so close.

I'm not saying there should be a parade in Athens if we lose Monday Night. The whole point of firing Richt and hiring Kirby was to avoid that stuff. But in the same way we loved and revered that team, let's never forget what this meant. If 'Bama wins, if Kirby's tenure never turns into the thing we hope it will, we have to remember the magic of this year. We have to treasure it, because it's been an incredible journey and it may never happen again.

Likewise, if the Dawgs can do this thing, if we pull it out, we have to remember this too. How perfect and improbable and great it all was. We want to beat 'Bama, but let's never BECOME 'Bama. Let us not turn into the monsters we abhor. In 2001, every sports fan in the world was awed by the underdog Patriots beating The Greatest Show On Turf. In 2004, we were all absolutely thrilled for the Red Sox. Now, think of how insufferable Boston fans have become. (To be fair, I lived in Boston for five years and have many dear friends who love those teams, but most of their fans are still assholes.) Alabama is the same thing. Even though we brought Kirby to Athens with the expressed purpose of replicating that success, let's never become the entitled, hateful fans it brings. Let us remember the lean years and retain some humility. Let us never become that which we despise. Let us never poison trees or talk needless shit to other fans. If this is the beginning of a dynasty at Georgia, let us be grateful and sing Glory Glory, but never forget how hard it was to get here or how easily we can slide back.

As I write this, the Falcons are playing in the Wild Card game, trying to replicate the beauty of last year. A beauty that ended in heartbreak. That's how thin the margin is. So win or lose, let us keep watching this Georgia team and all the teams that will come after it in the same way Annie Savoy described her team in Bull Durham and the same way Kirby coaches: "With joy and verve and poetry." Let us never, ever forget what this feels like.