Chris Conley sends out the same tweet from his Twitter account, @_Flight_31, every Sunday after Georgia plays a game.
“Glory to God in our wins and our losses. His love is matchless.”
The Bulldogs’ star receiver did the same thing Sunday, a day after Georgia was manhandled in a 38-20 loss to Florida in Jacksonville. Only this time, he got more than “Amen” in response.
A few fervid fans took exception to Conley’s calls for perspective. One Twitter follower got downright ugly with Conley and others who quickly came to the player’s defense.
The man, whose Twitter profile refers to himself as “a die-hard Dawgs’ fan,” replied to Conley’s tweet this way: “God doesn’t play u guys do. Yall just (expletive) the bed. Typical tweets from all u sorry players.”
That person’s response to Georgia’s unexpected loss to the Gators is extreme and irrational. But to a lesser degree, it’s representative of the emotional backdrop with which the Bulldogs traveled to Kentucky this weekend for Saturday’s noon game against the Wildcats.
Theirs is an angry fan base, frustrated with the annual letdowns and inexplicable losses that have tripped up UGA on the way unrealized championship goals year after year.
“That’s part of being a fan,” said Conley, who tried briefly to reason with his Twitter nemesis. “A fan is a fanatic; that’s the long form of the word fan. Sometimes wins and losses are the only thing that they think about. They don’t realize that this is our life and we live this for four or five years.
“On our faces, it may look like we’re letting something slide off our back. Really we feel it a little bit more than they do.”
Players also believe more than fans do in most cases, and it is with belief that they can still accomplish all of their goals for 2014 that the No. 20 Bulldogs boarded their plane Friday for Lexington.
Because of its loss to the Gators last week, Georgia (6-2, 4-2 SEC) fell a half-game behind Missouri (7-2, 4-1) for the lead in the SEC’s Eastern Division. The Tigers — who lost to Georgia 34-0 on Oct. 11 in Columbia — are off this weekend before finishing the season with road games against Texas A&M and Tennessee and at home against Arkansas.
It they win them all, the Bulldogs would have to sit by idly as Missouri plays in the SEC Championship game for a second consecutive year. But if Georgia wins Saturday against the Wildcats (5-4, 2-4) and Nov. 15 at home against No. 3 Auburn (7-1, 4-1), the Bulldogs will own the head-to-head tiebreaker and get to play in Atlanta for the third time in four years.
“Fans are going to say what they’re going to say; at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter,” wide receiver Michael Bennett said. “All that matters is what we say and do inside (the Butts-Mehre) building and stay tight-knit and not worry about the outsiders. That’s what we’re focused on right now.
“We can still salvage the season and win an SEC championship, which is really big. If we can do that, that’d be really amazing. So we’re just going to stay focused on that.”
To accomplish step one of that mission, the Bulldogs will have to defeat another dangerous and highly motivated opponent. The Wildcats have slipped up lately, losing their past three games (to LSU, Mississippi State and Missouri). But they started the season 5-1, with the lone loss coming on the road in triple-overtime to Florida. Kentucky has played well in newly renovated Commonwealth Stadium, beating South Carolina 45-38 and giving No. 1-ranked Mississippi State a frightful scare before falling 45-31.
Under coach Mark Stoops the Wildcats are trying to earn their first bowl bid since 2010. And they have the ingredients for success, a talented quarterback in 6-foot-5, 240-pound Patrick Towles and a physically-imposing defense that specializes in big plays (13 interceptions).
“I’m not handicapping any race right now,” Georgia coach Mark Richt said. “We’re just trying to win a game this Saturday. … This is the seventh time I’ve gone to this stadium, and I can’t think of one game that we had there that didn’t have a lot of drama and didn’t have a lot of question on who’s going to win until the very end.”
The Bulldogs have lost in Lexington on average once every 10 years. They last lost there 24-20 in 2006. Georgia eked out a 29-24 its previous visit, in 2012.
Lose to the Wildcats, and the Bulldogs can expect an even more vitriolic response from “the lunatic fringe.” In the meantime, they’ve chosen to tune out “the noise.”
“Nobody cares about what the outside says,” senior linebacker Amarlo Herrera said. “We know what we can do. We know the time and the effort that we put in each week. We just get back to grinding every week.”
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