FanNation - The Republic of Sport

If y'all are anything like me, you are sitting around a lot daydreaming about UGA winning the title this year. And if you do that, you will probably start thinking about what it takes to win it all.  Bear Bryant is the originator of "the ball has pointy ends, and can bounce either way."  My interpretation of that:  Ole Lady Luck , as Munson says, always has to smile on you if you are going to be #1. 

One only has to look at LSU's title run last year.  How many last second field goals, how many reckless calls from Lucky Les, how many nice breaks played into that championship?  A good bit.  And if you research it (I did) , that seems to happen more often than not. Most of the time, you don't have a juggernaught that just runs the table and blows everyone out.  Especially not in the "age of parity".  Remember "Lindsay Scott, Lindsay Scott, Lindsay Scott?" A very unlikely desperation play that went 93 yards against a very good Florida defense?  And being outsized and outpowered, and having your star back with a discolated shoulder, and still beating a top ranked Notre Dame team for the championship?  If you check the schedule results for the 1980 season, you find we did not utterly dominate people.  And we got many breaks.  That ball bounced our way.

The very next year, it took a ball bouncing vertically off the crossbar and then dropping in behind to give Clemson a last second field goal win over Georgia, and that propelled them into the national championship that year.  And in 1992, an overconfident Miami team got caught flat footed against Alabama, who knocked them off and won the title. You could kinda make the same statement about Hawaii versus us in the Sugar Bowl this year.  

Overconfidence has killed many championship runs.  Michigan was obviously overlooking Appy State last season.  And the 6 or 7 teams that spent a brief week ranked #2 did the same thing, and lost their shot.  And there is always a spoiler team lurking in every conference. In recent years,  Auburn has played that very well in the SEC.  My grandfather said Auburn was always dangerous.  He followed SEC football from 1920 until his death in 1977.  Nothing made him madder than Auburn spoiling his beloved Crimson Tide's season at the very end of the year.  And back in the 60's and 70's, Georgia enjoyed doing that to Florida.  Many times, the Gators would go into Jacksonville ranked top 5 and sky high, and by the end of the cocktail party, most of them would be on the benches with towels on their heads, weeping for what might have been. One of the main reasons Spurrier hates Georgia is because we did that to him when he was QB at Flordia.  The Georgia Sports blog had a post from Paul Westerdawg that explains it best:

During that game Bill Stanfill and George Patton worked Spurrier silly. There's an old joke that says that even to this day before Spurrier tees off when he's golfing...he looks around to make sure Stanfill doesn't sack him again. http://georgiasports.blogspot.com/2005/09/spurrier-vs-uga-old-ball-coach-talks.html

I really, really love that quote.  But back to the story.  Some of these Yankee and left coast detractors are going to accuse me of making excuses and backpedalling for my beloved Dawgs.  I expect, and welcome that.  What I am trying to say, however, is that it is very hard to win the Sears trophy, and the DAWGS are going to have to git-r-done.