Saturday will be my 26th Georgia-Georgia Tech game. Of the first 25, the ones that loom largest in memory are the ones Tech won, for the simple reason that Tech won only five.
That Tech beating Georgia has become the exception — Tech hasn’t won since 2008, and before that it hadn’t won since 2000 — has tinted my view of what old-timers assure me was a vibrant rivalry. (And yes, I’m aware Tech beat Georgia eight times running before Theron Sapp broke the drought in 1957.) By Southern standards, Tech-Georgia has become a tepid entity. Alabama-Auburn has no peer in its ferocity, but South Carolina-Clemson and Florida-Florida State are more heated, too.
While Georgia remains the biggest game of every year for the Jackets, Tech is the biggest game for the Bulldogs only those years when Georgia fans are afraid their team will lose. Only a couple of times since Mark Richt arrived and George O’Leary left have Bulldogs backers had cause to fret — in 2006, when Tech won the ACC Coastal and Georgia had four losses, and again in 2009, when the Jackets were ranked No. 7 and the Bulldogs were 7-4.
Tech’s 2006 loss in Athens was the beginning of the end for Chan Gailey. (The wretched 9-6 flop the next week against Wake Forest in the ACC title game hastened the flow.) It marked Gailey’s fifth consecutive loss to Georgia; on Nov. 26, 2007, two days after Loss No. 6, he was fired.
Paul Johnson arrived from Navy talking big and, sure enough, he beat the hated Mutts in his first try. A Georgia team that began 2008 ranked No. 1 led Tech 28-12 at the half. Seven minutes and five seconds into the third quarter, the Jackets led 35-28. (This astonishing surge came without benefit of the forward pass; Tech’s one completion of the rainy day came on its first snap.)
And Tech was even better in 2009. For 364 days, a rivalry gone cold saw Georgia fans get all hot and bothered. Those folks might deny it now, but back then Bulldog Nation lived in fear of what Tech and Johnson might become. On the night of Nov. 29, 2009, Georgia played the sort of sledgehammer football seldom seen under Richt and put such fears to rest. Washaun Ealey and Caleb King each rushed for more than 100 yards, and afterward they held up a sign that read, “We run this state.”
Five years later, Georgia runs it still. The Bulldogs beat Tech by 14 in 2011 and by 32 in 2012. They trailed 20-0 last year — Aaron Murray had torn his ACL a week earlier — and won in double overtime. For 364 days between 2008 and 2009, it was believed Johnson had closed, or at least narrowed, the gap between Tech and Georgia; on a day when the Jackets couldn’t hold a 20-point lead at home against an opponent working behind a quarterback making his first collegiate start, the expanse never seemed so vast.
Come Saturday, Tech will face the Bulldogs with its best team since the ACC winners of 2009. Tech has won its past four games by an aggregate 108 points and will arrive at Sanford Stadium ranked 16th by the College Football Playoff committee. It’s fair to say that Tech has, for the first time in a while, piqued Georgia fans’ interest.
It also must be said that Georgia folks aren’t scared. They will be if the Jackets score three touchdowns in the first eight minutes, but they’re not scared now. Georgia is ranked seven spots higher, has won its past three games by an aggregate 105 points and is favored by 12 1/2, which is a huge spread in a meeting of 9-2 teams.
When a rivalry gets skewed, we start believing the dominant side will lose only after it has actually lost. I’m convinced Tech will stand a very good chance against Florida State, unbeaten over two calendar years and the reigning national champion, in Charlotte on Dec. 6, but I have a hard time thinking the Jackets can beat a Georgia team that will be playing without Todd Gurley and was, only this month, overwhelmed by Florida, which has since fired its coach.
If you’d never seen a Tech-Georgia game in person, that wouldn’t make much sense. But I’ve seen 25.
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