How Georgia came to view rival Auburn as just ’another SEC opponent’

ATHENS — Kirby Smart acknowledges the history between Georgia and Auburn.

He knows this game was played in Columbus for a number of years. He’s played in the rivalry as a player, giving him perspective on what it’s like to play a night game at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

He’s had a tremendous amount of success against the Tigers, going 9-1 as the head coach in the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry, which will be played for the 130th time Saturday (7:30 p.m., ABC).

That acknowledgment of history, which Smart gave at his news conference Monday, makes his vanilla thoughts on this specific rivalry all the more telling.

“Yeah, they’re all special,” Smart said. “I mean, they’re all special. I mean, look at the league and look at the people we play and look at the competitive rivalries. There’s obviously a longer-standing tradition with this one, which gives you guys something to write about.”

For the many rivals Georgia has, Smart has been most successful against the Tigers. To this point, Auburn and Kentucky are the only teams he has beaten in every season he’s been at Georgia. Auburn’s lone win against Smart came in 2017 at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

But Georgia got revenge in the SEC championship game that season, sending Georgia to the College Football Playoff. From that point, Georgia ascended to a different level, while Auburn slid back as a program.

Those viral moments helped fuel the animosity between the two schools.

But Malzahn was fired after the 2020 season. Since then, Auburn has regressed even further as a program, while the Bulldogs have won multiple national championships.

Georgia is 57-6 since the start of the 2021 season. Auburn has lost seven games in each of the past four seasons. The Tigers already have lost two games this season, on the road against Oklahoma and Texas A&M.

But the waning of this rivalry extends beyond Smart. In the past 20 meetings between these schools, Auburn has won three times. Once with Cam Newton — who is set to be honored at halftime Saturday — another on a deflected Hail Mary in 2013 and the 2017 win.

“We just look at it as an SEC game, an SEC opponent,” tight end Lawson Luckie said. “They’re all the same. They’re all big games. We know how tight the SEC has been this year, and you can’t sleepwalk into any game. Obviously, we wouldn’t because Auburn is such a good opponent. They’ve put some really good stuff on tape, but we just look at it as another SEC opponent.”

That level of dominance has, in some ways, impacted how fans feel about the rivalry. At least from the Georgia side.

But the on-field dominance isn’t the only reason the energy around the rivalry seems to have waned.

With the exception of the 2017 SEC championship game, the annually scheduled meeting between Georgia and Auburn had been played in November from 1937 through 2019.

But starting with the 2020 season — impacted by COVID-19 — this game has been played largely in October. The most recent trip to Auburn came Sept. 30, 2023, the only time in series history the game has been played in the ninth month of the year.

Part of the reason the game was moved up was to give Auburn more space from its end-of-season rivalry game against Alabama, which was traditionally two weeks after the Georgia game. Since 2020, Auburn is 0-10 against its two most storied rivals.

Hugh Freeze, who took over as Auburn’s coach before the 2023 season, hasn’t exactly embraced the rivalry either. He once said he was unaware that Smart took Georgia to the national championship game in his second season in charge of the Bulldogs. And following the 2023 loss, when it seemed like the SEC would be sticking with an eight-game conference schedule, Freeze publicly acknowledged there was a chance the Georgia-Auburn rivalry might be going away.