ATHENS — The seniors on Georgia’s football team endured three consecutive disappointing seasons, each more disappointing than the previous, and this season’s 0-2 start.
They felt, tight end Aron White said this week, as if they had been “dipped through the wringer.”
Suddenly they find themselves out of the wringer and on the verge of a ring.
Georgia’s seniors will play their final game in Sanford Stadium on Saturday afternoon against Kentucky, and if the Bulldogs extend their winning streak to nine games, the senior class will balance its disappointments with an SEC East championship.
“If you had told me my freshman year that my Senior Day in Sanford Stadium would be to clinch an Eastern Division title, I couldn’t have drawn up anything better than that,” punter Drew Butler said.
Said White: “I couldn’t think of a better way to go out, short of being undefeated.”
Butler and White are among 21 seniors on Georgia’s roster, all of whom will honored before Saturday’s game. The group includes starting offensive linemen Ben Jones, Cordy Glenn and Justin Anderson, starting fullback Bruce Figgins, starting cornerback Brandon Boykin, starting defensive end DeAngelo Tyson and placekickers Blair Walsh and Brandon Bogotay.
Although the Bulldogs’ younger players — the likes of freshmen Isaiah Crowell and Malcolm Mitchell — have drawn much of the fanfare this season, the seniors can better appreciate the team’s turnaround, given the travails of recent seasons.
“We’ve seen the lows and the highs,” said Jones, a four-year starter at center, “and we don’t want to see those lows again. ... We were 1-4 at the beginning of last season. That hurt. You didn’t want to pick up a paper or look at the TV or Internet or anything.
“Now we know we’ve set ourselves up for a good situation. It comes down to, all we’ve got to do is beat Kentucky to win the SEC East in our home stadium for Senior Day. It’s what we wanted, and it is in our hands.”
For a while, the seniors feared they would be known as the group that ended coach Mark Richt’s tenure. Now they assume, like most others, that an SEC East title would silence the final whispers of the hot-seat speculation that swirled around Richt for more than a year.
“A major motivating factor was the fact that our coaches were being talked about like their jobs were gone,” White said. “If I was the end of the Mark Richt era, that is something that I would always regret. That’s not the way you want to leave your senior year.
“So we definitely banded together as seniors and did our parts in different areas of leadership — some of us more outspoken, some by example.”
Said junior cornerback Sanders Commings: “This senior class ... has taken over this team and held everyone accountable.”
This season’s seniors entered UGA in 2007 or 2008, depending on whether they redshirted. In either case, they arrived with the program on an upswing; the Bulldogs finished No. 2 in the nation in 2007 and were preseason No. 1 in 2008.
However, things quickly deteriorated. Georgia went 10-3 in 2008, a disappointing season in light of the preseason expectations, and followed that with bigger disappointments — an 8-5 record in 2009 and 6-7 in 2010.
“That’s the depths of Georgia football in the past decade, for sure,” Butler said of last season.
When this season started with back-to-back losses to Boise State and South Carolina, the Bulldogs had gone 6-9 in their past 15 games and 15-15 in their past 30.
“We hadn’t won a game in 10 months,” Butler said. “That was just dragging people down.”
Since then, the Bulldogs have won eight consecutive games, including six consecutive SEC games, to climb within one victory of the program’s first SEC championship game berth since 2005.
“People never really thought we were going to make it this far,” Tyson said. “But we just stuck together, this senior class, and were a good group of leaders.”
“I think really [the key was] just getting everybody on the same page and ... driving everybody into one direction,” Butler said. “I really think that is what leadership is — it is getting a lot of people focused on one goal — and I think that is exactly what we have done.”
Richt pointed out that the front row in Georgia’s team meeting room always is reserved for seniors, a symbol that their place is to lead.
“I’m proud of them,” Richt said of this season’s seniors. “They’ve been through a lot. They’ve been through some rough moments. But they’re here, and they’re in a good place right now.”
With as many as four games remaining — Saturday’s home finale, the Nov. 26 regular-season finale at Georgia Tech, potentially the Dec. 3 SEC title game at the Georgia Dome and then a bowl — the seniors’ story has significant chapters yet to be written.
“The way we started and the way we have fought back [have] given us the opportunity to be that Cinderella team,” White said. “It’s definitely something that is going to be remembered for a while, depending on how we finish out this season.
“Hopefully we can be remembered at Georgia in a positive light for leaving our mark.”
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