DEL.ICIO.USGators stumping to ignore Georgia’s stomping
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, October 27, 2008
Gainesville, Fla. — All quiet on the Reptile Front.
Having given his team Monday off — from football and media — Florida coach Urban Meyer officially opened the questioning for Georgia-Florida week and before you might ask one more time, here’s exactly what happened in 2007.
David Tulis/dtulis@ajc.com
Georgia’s unsportsmanlike act of rushing the end zone after its opening score during last year’s Georgia-Florida game is a sore point this year.
“The reason we lost the game a year ago is because we were very, very poor on defense,” the Gator coach said. “We didn’t tackle very well. We were out of coverage a couple times. We didn’t protect the quarterback.
“It was not because the sun was a certain way and the color shoes we wore.”
For those waiting for an escalation to the Gator Stomp, that’s about it. Georgia may have committed the team-wide unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on the 2007 game’s opening score. The play may have set the tone for the rest of the afternoon, if not redirected the future of the series itself. The fool replay may be running every time someone clicks on ESPN broadcasts this week.
But in Gainesville, on the surface at least, it is as if the incident has been swallowed by time. Gator players began giving “no comment” replies to retaliation questions as soon as they had beaten Kentucky Saturday. Athletics director Jeremy Foley joked with reporters Monday that the team was not really under a gag order, as portrayed.
But come on.
About as close an anyone came to incitement was quarterback Tim Tebow, who said Sunday, “I want to encourage our fans to make it the most unbelievable atmosphere in Jacksonville, Florida, we’ve ever seen. And I believe they will. Hopefully, at the end of the game, it will be special.”
Special? Whatever happened to the guys who used to cruise the Gator Bowl parking lot with the sign that claimed they had Barbara Dooley locked in the trunk?
As if folks might have forgotten, the Gainesville Sun’s Monday felt compelled to ask in its lead front-page headline, “Does Ga. Revelry still sting?” Florida has won 15 of its last 18 with Georgia (and 17 of the last 24). Does The Stomp really still resonate around here?
“Having grown up in Jacksonville and having played in that game, to me, Georgia’s winning the game is bigger than anything that happened during the game,” said Brady Ackerman, a former Gators running back (1987-91) who now hosts a sport-talk show in Orlando.
“The fact that Georgia won and they’re trying to get back into the series again, I think people are more interested in that than they care about the incident.”
Chris Doering, a former Gator wide receiver who grew up on Gainesville, can’t locate the outrage either. While he doubts the wisdom behind the stunt — “Not the brightest move. It could have been dangerous, as far as starting fights or getting someone hurt” — he does not believe in some vast emotional carryover.
“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” Doering said.
While Georgia has been similarly mum about rehashing 2007, the university’s sports information department reissued coach Mark Richt’s recollection of the day in remarks he made last August at the SEC’s preseason Media Days.
Widely reported at the time, Richt’s initial response to Meyer in a Sunday phone call may not be so well recalled. Game tape shows that while the Bulldogs are rushing the field, Meyer is walking the sideline with both arms extended and his hands upturned, as if looking for justice, if not a ref.
“I said [to Meyer] I was a coach desperate to try to get some enthusiasm, and I was willing to take a 15-yard penalty,” Richt recalled. “Now, in hindsight, I asked the team to do an unsportsmanlike act, because it’s called unsportsmanlike conduct, excessive celebration. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have done it. I won’t do anything like that again.”
Nevertheless, the same preseason SEC meeting coincided with the release of Meyer’s book, “Urban’s Way,” wherein he vowed to address Georgia’s misbehavior, concluding, “It will forever be in the mind of Urban Meyer and in the mind of our football team.”
Tebow, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, only went as far as to admit a picture of Georgia’s celebration has been hanging in the Florida locker room this fall. But standout wide receiver Percy Harvin told reporters over the weekend his team would not pull a similar stunt.
“That’s not our style,” Harvin said. “When teams do that, they expect not to score. We plan on putting points on the board, so we don’t need that.
“We don’t celebrate here. We go hug a big man and thank the people that got us in the end zone.”
Rarely has this game been so consequential. Florida is ranked No. 5 to Georgia No. 8 in the AP poll, the highest the two have stood since their 1983 meeting, a 10-9 Georgia victory.
The loser is essentially eliminated from the SEC East race, while the winner has an open road to the SEC title game and remains alive within the BCS with the four other contenders among the top 10 with one loss.
To those who are trying to sell this week for something more than that, the Florida coach isn’t buying. The Gator mute switch may last all week. It may not. But when one last questioner tried to raise their last weekend in Jacksonville, Meyer answered one last time.
“We were very soft, a very selfish outfit a year ago,” he said. “And we didn’t protect the quarterback and we dropped the ball twice. That’s how we lost that game.”
So go stomp on that for a while.
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