It's Time to Admit That This Georgia Season Just Hasn't Been That Much Fun. But Then Again: It's Just Getting Started
By Will Leitch | @williamfleitch
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This year hasn’t been very much fun. Can we just say that out loud? I know that you are thinking it. You have been thinking it all year. But no one wants to say it, because it makes us all look like jerks.
And why wouldn’t it? Our team is 11-1. It has done something that we all spent the middle of this decade frothing-at-the-mouth desperate to happen -- win the SEC East -- with considerable ease. It took care of all its rivals without breaking much of a sweat. If it wins its next three games – three games! That’s nothing! They won five games this year before we all noticed the season had started! – they will win a national championship, something none of us under the age of 40 have seen in our lifetime. By any objective measure, this is one of the five best Georgia teams of the last 60 years. This is what we wanted. This was the plan.
But has it instilled in you a sense of joy? Do you rush out to see this team and indulge in all its earthly pleasures? Has this year made you happy?
It hasn’t. It hasn’t even come close.
That’s odd, right?
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As Georgia heads to Atlanta for its third consecutive SEC Championship Game – something no SEC East team (and only one SEC West team, Alabama from 2014-16) has achieved this century – it is worth asking why this unquestionably successful, even historic, season has felt so unsatisfying … and whether that even matters. There are two reasons for this, I’d argue, one micro and one macro.
First, the micro: The games themselves. The experience of attending Georgia football games has been uninspiring and have felt weirdly obligatory from the very first snap this year. Nationally, it has become vogue for pundits to criticize Georgia for playing a dull, unimaginative brand of football, and even to openly cheer against Georgia so that they do not have to watch them play … but honestly, those people don’t know the half of it. Imagine sitting in the stands for this. Here is a back-of-the-napkin thumbnail sketch of what it was like to be in the stands for each Georgia football game this year (I personally made it to nine):
Vanderbilt: Fun to take over a road stadium for a night game, but a choppy game that half of us missed a quarter of while waiting in a beer line.
Murray State: A game so oppressively hot that it rivaled the infamous Austin Peay game last year, in which visiting relatives from Buffalo dissipated into vapor by halftime. Few fans remained to finish a game in which Stetson Bennett threw 13 passes and two touchdowns.
Arkansas State: Probably the nicest day on the calendar, and the most pleasant game of the year. Perhaps not coincidentally, arguably the best game Georgia played all year.
Notre Dame: The big dog game, a night game with ESPN’s Gameday and all the madness that comes with that. And there was much, much madness, from a particularly drunk, sloppy and rowdy crowd and seating snafus that led the Red and Black to run a comical “WORLD WAR III BEGINS” style headline. The game itself was choppy and halting, and despite being in control the whole game, Georgia still almost lost it in the final minutes. (UGA fans would get used to this feeling.) For all the excitement, most people I know involved with the whole experience, from fans to UGA staff to students to faculty, seemed relieved it was finally over so they could go on with their lives.
In September, Notre Dame played at Georgia for the first time in history. (Photo: Scott Duvall/Jawavi Films)
Tennessee: I didn’t go to this game, and honestly, who in the world would ever want to go to this town?
South Carolina: The nightmare scenario, and a game no one involved seemed to care about heading in, from an eerily quiet tailgating scene (a friend said pregame that it was the lamest pregame scene he could remember for an SEC game in his lifetime) to the team itself, which Kirby Smart said pregame “is not ready to play right now.” Say what you will about the man, but he knows his team: Jake Fromm looked like the Monstars stole his talent away, and the team screwed around just long enough to lose to a team that would win only one more game the rest of the season. Georgia lost at home to 4-8 South Carolina.
Kentucky: A brutal storm landed on Athens on Game Day and turned the game into an unwatchable slog, one that began with fans booing uninventive playcalling (but not the quarterback, no matter what the team wants to tell itself) and unleashing their frustration after the previous week’s debacle. The game was scoreless at halftime and the few fans remaining when the game was over left sopping wet and grouchy.
Florida: I wasn’t here, but Jacksonville is Jacksonville. It’s telling that we’ve all convinced ourselves that Georgia wiped out Florida here, even though they were one key third down conversion away from giving Florida the ball back with a chance to tie the game in the final minutes.
Missouri: A cold night, but an easy, if boring, shutout win.
Auburn: I wasn’t there, but I hear we were out there attacking camera people.
Texas A&M: Another dreary rain game, albeit only in the first half. Unfortunately, soaked clothes stay soaked even if it has stopped raining.
Georgia Tech: OK, this game was lovely, as all UGA home games on gorgeous Saturday afternoons always are. Though it’ll be retroactively miserable if D’Andre Swift is seriously hurt.
So fine: It hasn’t exactly been the Bataan Death March. But there really isn’t much joy there, is there? Every single game of 2017 that wasn’t at Jordan-Hare was more fun than the best one this year. Georgia scored more than 34 points 10 times last year; this year, only four times. Georgia has won. And winning is good. But while winning might be all that matters to football players and coaches – with good reason – it is not all that matters for the people who care about and follow a team (and thus are the ones paying for everything). Winning is the most important thing. But you cheer for a team not just for an efficient deployment of resources. You cheer for your favorite players, the ongoing storylines, the pure entertainment of it all. Fans have tried to make it happen, to inspire themselves to care as passionately about this team as they have others. They’ve cheered ZEUUUUUUS every time Zamir White enters a game, they’ve tried to elevate Monty Rice to Roquan Smith status, they lose their minds every time Rodrigo Blankenship does anything. They are not being snobbish or standoffish. But you cannot pretend James Spader and Kathy Bates were good on The Office no matter how much you might have wanted them to be. We want wins. But we also want fun. This is, after all, entertainment.
Georgia has won. But it has not provided much entertainment.
That might lead some into thinking Georgia fans are spoiled. Oh no, poor you, 11 wins just doesn’t do it for you anymore. That is absolutely fair. And that leads us into the macro issue. Which is what I think all this is about.
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I’m not sure a college football season can be more fun than the 2017 Georgia season was. You had the Notre Dame takeover, followed by the Revenge Tour (let us never forget that Georgia beat Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Georgia Tech and Florida, four teams they had lost to the previous season, by a combined score of 160-28), followed by that glorious SEC Title Game win over Auburn, followed by perhaps the greatest Rose Bowl (the Rose Bowl!) game of all time. It was all perfect, down to the very end, down to that absolute last play, that cursed throw from Tua Tagovailoa. That season had everything: Future NFL stars, beloved veterans, upstart out-of-nowhere freshman quarterbacks with the poise of men twice his age, storied college football shrines, the vanquishing of all hated rivals (save for one). You only get to have that sort of joy once. You’ll spend the rest of your life chasing that high.
But when you just miss, in a way that Georgia fans know so well, you have to keep trying. 2018 was an excellent chaser after the 2017 shot, and Georgia damned near pulled off another SEC title game upset, albeit one that fell short for reasons that would rear their ugly heads a year later (conservative offensive playcalling with a lead, odd timing on trick plays, two players negatively impacting Georgia late who just might both turn out to be in the playoff this year for teams that are neither Georgia nor Alabama). But it’s more fun when you’re an underdog. It’s always more fun when any fanbase gets to embrace an underdog. But Georgia fans, having watched all their rivals win titles since they have, will always have that Munsoning mentality. They’ll always walk around like no one believes in them, because deep down, they’re not so sure they do themselves.
The problem, though, is that Georgia is not being built to be the underdog. Georgia is being built to be late-aughts Alabama. (To the point that they even still play that style even though Alabama doesn’t even play that way anymore.) Georgia is attempting to become the sort of efficient, invincible, beat-you-bloodlessly-and-not-really-care-one-way-or-another unlikable Death Star that Alabama was back then. It is up in the air whether this strategy will work. (One advantage those Alabama teams had was that they had no Alabama to compete with.) But it is undeniably the strategy Kirby Smart, and those who fired Mark Richt to bring him in and are paying him more than any other employee of the state of Georgia, is going with. It might work. It should work! But it has yet to work. Georgia has not yet won a championship. Which means that Georgia is acting like a juggernaut that so far, it actually isn’t. It is going under the assumption that if it ultimately wins, no one will care how they did it. Which is true. If they win.
What this has set up is a high-stakes gamble, one in which a fanbase—one that is not necessarily known for its cold, rational behavior—is asked to be happy with winning, and winning only. In which much of what we think of when we think of cheering for a sports team (exciting play, inspirational individual story, an underdog “we can do this, guys!” aesthetic) is shelved for an implicit understanding that the people in charge have no one and nothing to answer to other than the scoreboard. You have seen it in the reaction to the crowd’s boos at the Kentucky game, the idea that fans somehow were booing the players rather than the millionaire coaches, something the staff surely knew wasn’t true but promoted anyway. You have seen it in the stubbornness and resistance to acknowledge basic truths that might be inconvenient, like when Smart continued to deny that he changed defenses with a lead late against Auburn even though the formation switch was obvious to everyone watching. You have seen it in the insistence that the offense is fine, that Jake Fromm is fine, that critics are mere haters, or gripers who just don’t understand what football really is.
The bet is that if they win, they do not need to be cheerful or inspirational. But if they do not win, something vital about Georgia football will be lost. Georgia will be Alabama … except with no titles. And that’s worse than just about anything else I can think of.
The frustrating, sad part about this too is that … I don’t think this is who Kirby Smart really is. I think this is who he thinks we all want him to be. Kirby Smart believes, not without justification, that he was brought in to be Nick Saban. But when have you enjoyed Kirby Smart and this program the most? Not when he is having rage-strokes into his headset on the sideline, or stonewalling a question at a press conference, or pretending that fans were booing Jake Fromm when he knew full well they weren’t.
No, you’ve enjoyed him most when he was acting like one of us. Because we all know deep down he is.
You’ve enjoyed this:
And this:
And this:
And this:
That is joy. That is winning. That is joy and winning. That is what Georgia is. That is what Georgia aspires to be. But they are not that yet. They still need both. And they can still have both. They’re supposed to be both.They are so much better when they are both.
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And that is the opportunity that awaits Georgia on Saturday in Atlanta. For all the frustrations with this season, for all the rainouts, for all the Notre Dame madness, for all the Jake Fromm struggles, Georgia can still have everything. It can all still happen. It can all still happen right now.
LSU comes into Atlanta having their version of 2017. This has been their dream season. They have a superstar quarterback who is not only about to win the Heisman Trophy but also keenly understands his fanbase, to the point that he even changed the spelling of his name for his final home game to honor them. They have a coach who is essentially their version of Kirby Smart, not in personal sensibility (obviously) but in local connection, one of their own taking their team to the mountaintop. And they have vanquished everyone in electrifying fashion, explosions and spectacle every Saturday. They’re everything their fans could have possibly wanted.
But as Georgia fans can tell you: Just because you’re having your dream season doesn’t mean someone can’t come by and ruin it for you. Georgia has that terrific defense, and for all the irritation the offense has provided, that irritation is a result of talent, the undeniable sense that there are more points in this offense and its players than this staff is currently squeezing out of it. (Even if it has struggled, I’d rather having Georgia’s offensive talent than anyone else’s in the SEC’s other than LSU’s and Alabama’s? Wouldn’t you?) Georgia has a more than a puncher’s chance to win this game. They are not favored to do so. But no one, not even the national pundits who are already sick of them, would be truly shocked to see them do it.
And that’s where we fans have to do our part. Because while this team hasn’t provided the joy we might have liked it to, part of this is our fault. After all: If the team this season is having right now had been transposed to 2017 – if they would have trudged, workmanlike, through that season the exact same way they’ve been doing in this one – we would all be losing our ever-loving minds. One win away from the playoff? Against a team that isn’t Alabama? Where do I sign up?
So let’s treat this season like that season. Fans don’t need anyone’s help to do that. Everything every Georgia fan has ever dreamed of is right there in front of us. If Georgia wins the national championship this year, no one will remember or care how miserable it was at that Kentucky game, or how lousy Fromm played against Texas A&M, or the inexplicability of what happened against South Carolina. Those will not be sad things that happened. They will be backstory. They will be the instigating events that had to be powered through to get us all to the promised land.
We can grouse about aspects of this season. We can be mocked for being so jaded about an 11-1 season. We can seethe that the rest of the country very much wants not to see Georgia in the playoffs. But none of that matters if Georgia wins Saturday. That’s the upside to the Georgia-as-Alabama plan. Some years won’t be as exciting as others. But, for three years running now, we’ve had this opportunity. It will not be around forever. We can conjure our own joy. We can make this year as special as 2017. We can be around to have it be even better.
The world is not a series of linear narratives that lead us from Point A to Point B in a clear, straightforward fashion. History lands on us out of nowhere. You never know when you’re a part of something incredible until you are. 2019 has not been the most joyous of Georgia football seasons. It’s OK to admit it. Yet here we are. And that’s the thing: 2019 isn’t over yet. 2019 is still happening right now, right there in front of us. Let’s go be a part of it. Let’s go be joyous. Who’s with me?
Will Leitch is a co-host of the Waitin’ Since Last Saturday podcast. He is a contributing editor for New York magazine, columnist for MLB.com, the author of four books and the founder of Deadspin.
(Top photo by Scott Duvall / Jawavi Films)
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