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AJC > Sports > UGA > Blog > Archives > 2008 > September > 25
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Big ain’t the word for it!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Game Day” is coming to town for the first time in 10 years. Mark Richt has called for another Blackout as Georgia and Alabama both bring Top 10 rankings to their game in Sanford Stadium. Tickets are going for as much as $600.
This is big. Aw, big ain’t the word for it, as Deputy Fife would say.
This is REALLY big.
Biggest home game ever? Well, that remains to be seen, but the 2008 edition of Georgia-Alabama will have to go some to match what took place on Oct. 2, 1976, when the No. 6 Bulldogs under Vince Dooley met Bear Bryant’s No. 10 Crimson Tide Between the Hedges.
It was one of the toughest tickets ever in Athens. Folks camped out overnight on the old tracks, and my Dad, who almost always could find a way into a game, wound up watching it from the bridge (which you could do back then) with, as he put it, “the drunks and the hippies.” The next year, Dad bought season tickets so that wouldn’t happen again. Me, I was in the seats under the overhang that I’d bought the year before and which I still have to this day.
From pre-game through to the end, it was the loudest I ever heard a Sanford crowd before they enclosed the one end of the stadium.
The 1976 Dawgs may not have had black jerseys, but they had their own motivational tool … shaved heads, with pretty much the entire team and coaching staff (including Dooley) bald by the end of the SEC championship season.
This was the second year of Erk Russell’s revived Junkyard Dawg defense, and they kept Alabama, coming off five straight SEC titles, in check the entire game, stopping one first-half drive with an interception and recovering a fumble to set up Georgia’s final scoring drive in the second half. Jeff Lewis finished the day with eight unassisted tackles.
On offense, the Bulldogs were running the veer option using tailback Kevin McLee and two quarterbacks, Matt Robinson (the passer) and Ray Goff (the runner), behind a massive veteran line that included Mike “Moonpie” Wilson and Joel “Cowboy” Parrish. The line was so good that when Robinson misread a signal from the sideline and ran an option into the strong side of the Tide defense instead of the weak side as intended, he still ended up in the end zone. Another 72-yard drive by the Dawgs in the first half resulted in no points when a fake field goal play failed. In the second half, Goff engineered a classic 10-play, 5 minute Dooleyball drive for another score. Robinson passed to Ulysses Norris for the third TD, as the Dawgs blanked the Tide 21-0. The Junkyard Dawgs had held the Tide to just 49 yards rushing. The Bear offered no excuses. “We lost to a superior football team today,” he said graciously after the game before going off to chomp on some Golden Flake potato chips.
The Georgia win set off a post-game scene in Athens that hasn’t been matched since, not even when the goalposts were torn down in the Donnan era. Dooley calls it “the biggest celebration that ever took place in Georgia football history.” The partying grew so intense that Milledge Avenue, home of many of the fraternities and sororities, had to be closed down by police because students were dancing in the street and stopping cars to shake hands with the drivers. The celebration continued on into the next week and legend has it that some classes had to be canceled.
So Georgia-Alabama 2008 has a lot to live up to. On paper, it looks like the ingredients are all there to produce another game for the ages.
Who knows, maybe they’ll even have to close Milledge Avenue again Saturday night!
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