ATHENS — When the Georgia football team left the Georgia Dome late on the night of Sept. 3, linebacker Alec Ogletree was on crutches, headed to surgery with a broken foot suffered in the first quarter of the season opener.
“I was just kind of devastated,” Ogletree recalled this week.
The rest of the Bulldogs weren’t feeling very well, either. They had been exposed as not ready for prime time in a 35-21 loss to then-No. 5 Boise State, and they knew the shaky performance would exacerbate the tensions in a Bulldog Nation still seething about the previous season’s 6-7 record.
“Everybody was putting such a big emphasis on that game, and everybody was excited about it, and we fell short,” cornerback Brandon Boykin said. “People were kind of saying, ‘Oh, back to old Georgia, man, just like last year.’”
Exactly three months later, the Bulldogs will be back in the Georgia Dome on Saturday — this time for an even bigger game, the SEC Championship game, against an even better opponent, No. 1 LSU.
The Bulldogs have gone 10-1 since their previous trip to the Dome, losing the following week to South Carolina before putting together the program’s longest single-season winning streak in 29 years. Clearly, the team that returns to the Dome on Saturday will be more seasoned, more confident and more accomplished than the one that flopped in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff game.
To compete with LSU, though, the team will have to be a lot better.
Georgia unquestionably has improved over the course of the season, but its schedule has made the extent of that improvement difficult to quantify. None of the 10 wins came over a team that is ranked in this week’s national polls. The cumulative league record of the seven SEC teams Georgia defeated is 14-42.
Of course, a team can only beat the teams on its schedule, and Georgia has handled the past 10, from Coastal Carolina to Georgia Tech. The streak included victories over major SEC rivals Tennessee, Florida and Auburn, none of which had a winning league record this season.
Conveniently absent from Georgia’s regular-season schedule were the SEC teams ranked in the nation’s top 10 — LSU, Alabama and Arkansas. When Georgia finally runs into one of those teams Saturday — the one that beat the other two — a definitive measure of the Bulldogs’ progress should emerge, one way or the other.
Georgia is a two-touchdown underdog to LSU, the same margin by which it lost to Boise State. But for whatever it’s worth, the players believe they are ready for the big stage this time, in part because of what happened three months ago.
“[We are a] totally different team from the first game in the Dome,” Boykin said. “Everybody has a lot more experience [and will] be able to play in that environment and know what it’s like to play in the big game. We had a lot of freshmen, a lot of young guys, that had to play that first game against a very experienced Boise team. ... A lot of people were nervous and had to get adjusted to the situation of a college football game.”
Quarterback Aaron Murray said the team’s younger players are “more equipped” for a marquee game at this point.
“It’s probably not a bad thing that we’ve already been there,” said coach Mark Richt, who previously conceded his team wasn’t ready for the magnitude of the opener. “We’ve experienced the stadium and realized it’s not so much where you’re playing, it’s how you play when you get there.”
A lot has changed in three months.
Ogletree recovered from his foot surgery, returned to action five games ago and became a force at inside linebacker. Safety Bacarri Rambo, who was suspended from the Boise State game, and linebacker Jarvis Jones, who was playing in his first game in 22 months, emerged as the SEC leaders in interceptions and sacks, respectively. Malcolm Mitchell, a freshman wide receiver, became a key playmaker.
“I really didn’t know what I was doing [against Boise],” Mitchell said. “Now it’s different. Now, when we enter the Dome, it’ll be a lot different team than you saw the first time.”
Despite the Bulldogs’ disappointment in the Dome, the team has been driven by a desire to get back there.
“It was a motivation to get back because we knew what that would mean for our season, the turnaround we would have,” linebacker Christian Robinson said.
Even the player with the most painful memory of the season opener, Ogletree, relishes the return.
“It’s a great opportunity to go back to the Dome,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been working for — to go back.”
About the Author
