GEORGIA AT ARIZONA STATE: But it will be a dry heat

Athens —- As Georgia’s football team prepared for a trip to the desert, a chill came over its practice fields this week: a balmy, breezy, 66-degree chill.

“Really nice weather,” linebacker Rennie Curran said after practice a couple of days ago. “But in the back of our mind, we know it’s not what we need to get ready.”

When the Bulldogs arrive in Tempe, Ariz., this afternoon, they will be greeted by temperatures forecast to reach 101 degrees. At kickoff of Saturday’s game against Arizona State, to be played in a stadium carved from the desert a half-century ago, the temperature will be 98 degrees under a sunny sky, forecasters say.

OK, it’s not as if football players from Georgia are unaccustomed to sizzling heat.

And how much hotter can it be in Tempe than it was last Saturday in Columbia, anyway?

Well, we’ll see.

“I talked to my brother-in-law,” said Georgia coach Mark Richt, referring to the well-traveled NFL quarterback Brad Johnson, “and he said most NFL teams that go cross-country to play in that element early in the season usually lay an egg.”

For the most part, Georgia’s players say they’ve never been to Arizona and don’t know what to expect. Some have heard the heat is stifling. Others have heard the lower humidity —- 20 percent humidity is forecast for game time —- creates more bearable dry heat. And there’s no institutional memory to call upon, this being Georgia’s first game in the state of Arizona in 115 years of football.

Richt said he considered traveling a day or two earlier than for typical road games —- Friday —- and he said trainer Ron Courson talked with other schools about various ideas for handling the game conditions. In the end, Georgia decided to travel and prepare as it would for a game at, say, Ole Miss.

“It would take longer than a day or two to climatize, anyway,” Richt said. “We have a pretty good record in other people’s homes [26-4 since 2001], so I thought, let’s stay as close to that routine and rhythm as possible and see what happens.”

His plan for the game in Sun Devil Stadium —- sometimes called the House of Heat by Arizona State fans —- is to play a lot of people in the first half and look forward to the temperature dropping in the second half.

The game will begin shortly after 5 p.m. Arizona time (8 p.m. EDT) —- preferable weather-wise to, say, a mid-afternoon kickoff.

“From what I have been told, the temperature could drop as much as 12 degrees by halftime,” Richt said. “I think our plan has to be to substitute heavily in the first half, knowing that in the second half it’ll be cooler. I just want to have enough energy to finish strong.

“That’s the biggest plan to beat the heat.”

The plan, he suggested, includes relieving star tailback Knowshon Moreno with Caleb King and/or Richard Samuel at times in the first half.

Moreno, a New Jersey native, said he’s never been farther west than New Orleans. “But I’ve heard it’ll be a different kind of heat,” he said. “Just got to get used to it real quick and play ball.”

Georgia quarterback Matthew Stafford, who grew up in Dallas, played in baseball tournaments in west Texas and Arizona during high school. As he recalls, the scorching dry heat was no worse than last Saturday’s humid heat at South Carolina.

“I’ve never cramped like that in a game or in my life,” Stafford said of his experience in Columbia. “I just felt like I couldn’t stop sweating. I couldn’t put enough [fluids] in me to replace what was going out.

“I don’t think it could get too much worse for me.”

But several days after the scorcher in Columbia, prematurely cool weather visited North Georgia —- an inopportune time for a team preparing for a game in the desert.

On the practice fields behind the Butts-Mehre building Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons —- the Bulldogs’ key practices of the week —- the temperature didn’t climb above the mid-60s.

“I don’t want to make this bigger than it is,” Richt said, “but I do know that practicing in 65 degrees and playing in 95 to 100 degrees is going to be a big, big difference. Hopefully our guys will be able to handle it.”

SUN DEVIL STADIUM * 8 P.M. SATURDAY * ABC * 750 AM

On ajc.com/sports: Go online for photo previews for Saturday’s Georgia Tech and Georgia games.