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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > August > 17
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Dogs can learn from talented 2004 team
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It was the most talented squad Mark Richt had assembled. Twenty of its members would be drafted by NFL clubs. Yet the 2004 Bulldogs remain the lost boys of the Richt reemergence, the one Georgia team from 2002 through 2005 not to win the SEC East, the one team from that giddy era to go down as disappointing.
As the 2008 Bulldogs enter their season ranked No. 1 in the land, it’s instructive to recall what befell the Georgia team that, until this month, held the distinction of being rated the highest in any preseason. The 2004 Bulldogs began at No. 3 in the Associated Press poll and were still No. 3 on Oct. 9. Then everything changed.
“We lost the wrong game at the wrong time,” said Thomas Brown, a freshman tailback that year. “We lost and we weren’t able to recover.”
“That may have been the craziest year,” said Tony Taylor, who was scheduled to start at linebacker in 2004 but who missed the season after hurting his knee in the G-Day game. “For us to play the way we did against LSU, and then to see what happened against Tennessee … that’s just college football.”
On Oct. 2, 2004, the Bulldogs authored their most impressive display under Richt, beating the reigning national champ 45-16 in Athens. For all the good work done in their distinguished careers, it seemed David Pollack and David Greene and Thomas Davis and Fred Gibson had saved the best for last.
The subsequent Saturday brought another home game. Tennessee arrived as a 12 1/2-point underdog, having lost to Auburn by 24 the week before. But Georgia fell behind 10-0 and could never catch up. “It was one of those games,” Taylor said. “The atmosphere in the stadium was kind of weird. It wasn’t the same as the week before.”
Those Bulldogs would likewise never be the same. They beat Florida, but Ron Zook was by then a lame duck. Come November, Auburn had grown into the team Georgia was supposed to be, and the Tigers thumped the Bulldogs 24-6. Georgia wouldn’t play for the SEC title for the first time since 2001, and its bowl destination was Tampa for the Outback against Wisconsin.
If the season wasn’t a flop — how bad can it be when you 10-2 and finish No. 7 in the AP poll? — neither was it the culmination the Bulldogs had envisioned. Such a memory can stand as a cautionary tale.
Nothing really went sour in 2004. “There was nothing going on internally,” said D.J. Shockley, who backed up Greene that season, and that’s the point: Even a gifted and harmonious team can be undone by one misstep.
Brown, Taylor and Shockley — all of them on the Falcons’ roster, which gives us some idea of the depth of the 2004 Bulldogs — believe this latest edition has a better chance than they did. “They have everything we had and more,” Brown said.
Said Taylor: “As overall talent goes, I would agree [that the 2004 team was the best of that Georgia era]. There were so many athletes. In 2002 [Richt’s breakthrough season], we’d just been a brick wall … But if you go over there now, you see something totally different. They’ve got athletes all across the board.”
As it turned out, the 2004 Bulldogs probably wouldn’t have won the BCS title had they gone unbeaten. The teams ranked above them in August — No. 1 Southern Cal and No. 2 Oklahoma — were still undefeated in January, and they met in the Orange Bowl. (Ask any Auburn fan.) But this time Georgia will begin with no school ahead of it, and that’s a major difference.
“It’s all in their hands,” Brown said. “The championship is theirs to lose.”
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