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.
