These Are The Good Times. Enjoy Them.
By Will Leitch | @williamfleitch
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One staple of this particular Georgia football era has been the Kirby Smart Ragestroke. We all know the Kirby Smart Ragestroke. A vein starts to pop out of his forehead; he starts shaking and his headset falls off; everything above his neck turns an alarming purple. The Kirby Smart Ragestroke is uncomfortable to watch not just because you worry he’s going to keel over—though there is definitely that—but because it’s almost too much emotion for a man to show in front of strangers. It feels invasive for us to even witness, as if we have stumbled across an intensely personal moment that we have not earned the right to see. Honestly, you find yourself just hoping the guy’s OK.
What has been telling, what may tell us all we need to know about both the 2022-23 Georgia Bulldogs football team and this fanbase’s relationship to them, is that I don’t think I’ve seen the Kirby Smart Ragestroke once all season. There have been moments where it might have been in order: The second half of the LSU game, the first half of the Kentucky game, the first three quarters of whatever the hell was going on in that Missouri game. But I haven’t seen it. Have you? There have been multiple occasions, during press conferences or postgame interviews, where you might have thought a 2019-South Carolina-pregame-esque “these guys aren’t ready to play” might have been coming, but Smart has avoided them, every time. In fact, he has consistently done the opposite. He has spoken all year about how this team has a different personality than some of his past Georgia teams, younger, more emotional, even a little more sensitive. “You handle different teams in different ways,” he said after the Kent State game, an easy win but a choppy one, the first time we all realized, “OK, so maybe not every game is going to be completely perfect.” Sure, if you happen to be walking by Butts-Mehre when the team is practicing and hear Smart screaming into his bullhorn, he doesn’t exactly track as “calm.” But I do think he’s a little bit more chill this year. I’m less worried his head is going to explode, anyway.
And you know what? I think we’re all a little bit more chill this year. The big question of this season was always going to be how we all—all of us: The players, the coaches, the fans, the whole vibe—reacted to finally catching that car Georgia fans had been chasing for four decades. That relentless fatalism, the Munson-ing, the “we know this will all end in pain” that every Georgia fan had lived with since 1980, on one freezing night in Indianapolis, with one glorious interception return for a touchdown, it all went away. We got what we wanted: Our dreams all came true. But then what happens? The stressful foot-tapping as the season approached, that nervous wait for the piano to fall on our heads, that worry that we’d die before we saw that national championship, it wasn’t there this year. The wipeout of Oregon in the season opener left you both beating your chest and feeling a little disoriented: Wait, is this just what it’s going to be now? Even the scare of the Missouri game didn’t feel like that much of a mortal threat—more like a record briefly skipping before settling back into its rightful groove. And the Tennessee game? Well, that was just putting those overall-wearing dinguses back in their proper place. We didn’t tear our hair out. We didn’t lose our minds. We didn’t act like we had before. Which is to say: We didn’t really know how to act. Because what kind of Georgia fan is chill? Since when has that been what this has been about?
That was the challenge for the staff, and Smart, from the get-go. They can say all they want about putting last year behind them, it only matters what you do today, attack the day or whatever, but those claims are easily refuted by the fact that those involved with the Georgia football program are in fact human beings: You cannot accomplish what Georgia accomplished last year, to win that championship and fling off decades of suffering, to have people climbing up light poles and crying with joy, and not have it change you and the way you see the world. It’s different this year. It has been different from the beginning. Last year, Georgia football was trying to overturn decades of frustration, to fundamentally change everything about how everyone saw them, how they even saw themselves. This year, they just got to be a really awesome football team. This year, they got to take a breath … and, oh yes, go out and play 14 games and not lose a single freaking one of them.
And that, friends, is why this is better.
This is all upside. If Georgia loses—and, this cannot be repeated enough, Georgia has not lost this season, not once—it is not, in fact, the end of the world. We already got to the mountaintop! The thing we thought would never happen has in fact happened! Georgia fans have been able to fling away that weight on their shoulders—it’s gone. So instead we’ve just enjoyed the ride. There haven’t been a lot of nervous moments this season: Missouri, sure, fine, but that was really about it until the Ohio State game, and we’ll get to that Ohio State game in a moment. But I’d argue the lack of nervous moments isn’t just because Georgia has been stomping everyone since Labor Day. It’s because what do we have to be nervous about? Georgia won the national championship last year. They beat Alabama. We vanquished the demons. They did it. You really can’t say it enough: They did it.
Kirby Smart speaking at the national championship celebration in January 2022 (photo by Scott Duvall of Jawavi Films)
That has made this season just one glorious bonus round after another. If Georgia would have lost to Alabama in Indianapolis last year, you’d have been devastated, and with good reason: Another year without a title, the Dawgs blew it again. But if they’d have lost to Missouri, or Ohio State, you’d have been bummed, sure, but—can we just admit it?—it wouldn’t have been devastating. Because the question we all worried about, most of our adult lives, are they ever gonna win one? has been answered. Yes. Yes, they were going to win one. They did. We all saw it. It was as amazing as we’d imagined it being. It was probably even a little better.
That feeling did not vanish this year. The thing is, folks: Sports don’t have to be painful. Sometimes, you just get the good stuff. This year: Georgia fans have only gotten the good stuff. Even the Ohio State game—my god, that game—was nothing but the good stuff. For three quarters, Georgia fans came face to face with the fact that, eventually, someday, their team was going to lose. Ohio State was better—hungrier, healthier, more desperate, with a quarterback playing a face-melter of a game. I thought they were going to lose, you thought they were going to lose, I suspect most of the team, deep down, thought they were going to lose. And while it wasn’t what anybody wanted, it’s OK to admit that you would have been all right with it. You probably wouldn’t have watched Ohio State-TCU, and there’d be some growling on the message board, but at the end of the day, you’d be all right. Because they won last year. Because they did it.
But then, hey, how about that: In front of the whole world, Georgia ended up pulling off the most exciting win since I’ve been a Georgia fan. (I reserve the right to change my mind as the years go along, but I do think that was even a little bit better than the Oklahoma Rose Bowl.) It was stressful and exciting and chock-full of immortal Bulldog moments, from Arian Smith being wide open to the perfect AD Mitchell catch and throw to The Timeout, my goodness that Timeout, the most highlight-reel play you’ll ever see a coach make, a call so clutch that even Smart himself seemed a little stunned after he made it. And then, just to make it more perfect, just to make sure no one ever forgot it, the missed field goal as time expired, not just on the game but on the year itself, the year that we finally won the natty ending as the kick went up and the year that we’re gonna win the next one starting as the kick fell short. My goodness.
And there at the middle of it was the quarterback, the guy who is older than Jake Fromm, the guy who Smart said had to “overcome his own coaching staff” to even get on the field in the first place, the guy who spent most of last year watching most of the world (and even some of his own fanbase) calling for him to be benched, the guy who said he wanted to come back after winning Georgia the national championship and still had some (including some of his own coaches) wondering whether we wanted him … he just marched Georgia down the field and threw a jaw-dropper of a pass to give Georgia the lead, and the win, and a capper to as glorious of a year as any fanbase has had in any sport in my lifetime.
Sometimes you get everything you want. It’s OK. You deserve it.
And I think Kirby Smart—who grew up with Georgia football, who played Georgia football, who is so tied to the people here that when he won the national championship one of the first things he did was compare it to a Widespread Panic show he went to in 1998—feels it. He knows what he has done, how it has changed things, how Georgia and its fans are different now. I do not think this has made him, or his team, lose his competitive edge. I have no doubt he had his eyeballs glued to game tape since the second they peeled him off the Mercedes-Benz field Sunday morning. (And it’s worth noting he didn’t look particularly happy after that game was over either.) You don’t go 14-0 if your coach takes his foot off the gas.
But I do think he feels the change. I think it’s why he Ragestrokes less. I think it’s why he talks about his team’s personality differently than he has in the past. I think it’s why we’re all less worried about him keeling over.
And I think it’s why he keeps winning. Because sports don’t always have to be about pain. Sports can be, and should be, fun. They shouldn’t be a referendum on whether or not the years obsessing over our team will be worth it if our team never wins a championship. Because we know they’re not that now. Because we won one.
Now: We can go just out and win another one.
These are the good times. This is what you were waiting for. It won’t always be like this. It can’t be. So enjoy it. Soak it all in. Bask in all its reflected glory. You’ve earned it. We’ve all earned it. This is what we were waiting for. Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it just the best?
Will Leitch is the co-host of the Waitin’ Since Last Saturday podcast and the author of six books, including the Athens-set HOW LUCKY and the upcoming (and also Athens-set) THE TIME HAS COME. He lives in Athens with his wife and two sons.
(Top photo by Scott Duvall / Jawavi Films)
Hear the Waitin’ Since Last Saturday National Championship Game Preview