Richt: Treat home games like the road

Athens — Astute Bulldog observers might have noticed that the “Dawg Walk” started 15 minutes earlier than usual before the Tennessee game this past Saturday. There was a good reason for that.

Coach Mark Richt said he decided after the Alabama game to treat Georgia’s home games like road games from now on. Richt noted that the Bulldogs’ record in road games against SEC opponents and Georgia Tech is better than at home — .862 (25-4) to .733 (22-8). So now they’re taking a bus directly from the team hotel at Lake Lanier, where they spend Friday nights, to Sanford Stadium. The previous routine included an extended stop at their football headquarters at Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall.

“I thought there were a few more distractions at home, so I wanted to try to simulate our road games,” Richt said. “If you go straight from the hotel to the stadium, put your pads on, warm up and go, there’s not a lot of time to lose your focus. I think we were spending too much time at our Butts-Mehre building. I just wanted to make sure we kept that great focus from the hotel to the ballgame.”

Not surprisingly, after the mostly dominating performance against Tennessee, Richt plans to stick with the new routine. So Saturday’s Dawg Walk also will be two hours before kickoff.

“I liked it so I think we’ll continue to do that,” he said.

Old song made new

Spectators at Saturday’s homecoming game will hear a Georgia fight song that hasn’t been played publicly for more than 100 years.

Lloyd Winstead, associate director of UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and a former Redcoat Band member, discovered through research a long-lost song called “Red and Black March,” according to a UGA news release. According to the release, the song was composed in 1908 by R.E. Haughey, who directed a small military band at UGA from 1905-09. It is uncertain if the song was ever played by the Redcoat Band, but the music disappeared decades ago. The only reference to it was in a 1962 history of the Redcoat Band that refers to the march as “Georgia’s first original school song.”

The Redcoat Band had to convert the song from a piano piece into an arrangement for a 100-piece marching band. The new arrangement will be unveiled for the first time Saturday.