Well Dawg fans, here’s another installment of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry. This time, there isn’t as much at stake as there has been in year’s past, but that doesn’t change the importance to the true fans and the players.

Auburn is doing its best to salvage a winning season and some half-assed bowl bid. UGA is still hoping beyond hope that they can sneak into a BCS bowl, but they can’t win their way in like last year – a lot of good teams have to fall on their swords to keep us from booking that trip to central Florida for the Outback or Capital One bowl. But this should still be a pretty good football game.

Georgia has an offense that has shown some really high octane at moments and Auburn’s D has been pretty solid all year (see the 3 – 2 win over Mississippi State). Georgia’s D has been suspect, to say the least, lately and Auburn appears to be finding their groove since they fired their OC halfway through the season. So, it’s strength against strength when the Dogs have the ball and weak against weak when the Tiggers have the ball. No, that wasn’t a typo. Anyway, we’ll be rolling along with CoverIt Live! for the live blog, and it’s getting close to kickoff. So, tune in to Raycom Sports and join me in watching the Dogs beat down the Tiggers. Or watch this blog and join the comments, whichever.

First, let me eat the well-deserved crow. I wasn’t as bad as some, but I still talked smack about the Gators. I thought, especially after that LSU game, that’d we’d be winning that elusive second Cocktail game in a row. I was wrong. So very wrong. Any Gator fans that feel the need to flame, try to keep it civil as possible please, but I’ll accept it all graciously. The entire Bulldog Nation are yours to abuse for a week. Enjoy it.

Now, let’s break this down. The Interweb has been awash with Bulldog apologists, blaming everything from Penn Wagers and his crew to Global Warming for the loss. I’m big enough to admit that the Gators opened the whole truck of whoop ass on us Saturday. And that they’ll play Bama for the SEC title. And that we should have been ready for this after last year. But, in an effort to stop the self-loathing for all the fans out there I’m going to break this thing down (and probably renew a rant I never should have abandoned).

4 things happened Saturday: Lady Luck gave us the ol’ Rochambeau, the officials blew some Bush-league calls, them damn Gators played a superb game, and we left our heart back in Athens. Much as I wish it could be blamed on the first 3, the last one was what really did us in.

First about the officials – yes, they blew some atrocious calls. But the worst ones weren’t seen by most. The hands to the face call that nullified the interception should have been a holding call to begin with. On Stafford’s first INT, while you could have called interference or holding, it didn’t really matter since the defender actually kept AJ CLOSER to the poorly under-thrown pass. The offensive interference call that wasn’t – did it really matter at that point? I think we already started warming up the bus by then. But the ones that really killed me were questionably late hits on Stafford that weren’t called, and the blatant holds on UF’s O line that were let go. I know that holding is part of the game, but DAMN! The challenge that everybody KNEW was good, but that replays couldn’t PROVE was right by letter of the law, but I believe it changed the spirit of replay for some time to come.

Surely the staff has finally managed to edit the tape that they send (every week) to the SEC office to about an hour. Will we get a few more favorable calls against UK and Auburn? Probably. As long as Penn Wagers’ crew isn’t on the field. Say what you want, but those guys get their revenge too. And I grew up thinking that he ran a pretty tight crew, but that has changed in the past few years. However, at the end of the day, you can’t blame the officials.

The Gators played a superb offensive game, taking every advantage we gave them and exploiting it for 49 points. Granted, we gave them a short field most of the time (which is why we outgained them by an order of magnitude or so), but that’s what good teams do. And it doesn’t help that we never, not one time, showed any testicular fortitude and tried to take the momentum away. I still say that their defense is suspect. They outmatched us up front (just like Bama did) and were able to stop the run and let us beat ourselves the rest of the way. 7 days out of 7, I’ll take LSU’s secondary over UF’s. We didn’t kill ourselves in Baton Rouge. We committed Hiri Kiri in Jacksonville. read this entry »

Well, Georgia is without a game this week so we’ll do a quick wrap up of the Bama debacle and what’s ahead for the By God University of Georgia Bulldogs. Then lets do a quick overview of the rest of the country and take a look at a couple of good matchups this week.

Talk about a tale of two halves last Saturday. I will still give Bama all the credit in the world – they came out and punched us right in the mouth FIVE STRAIGHT POSSESSIONS and left us for dead. And I’ll give them Dawgs a lot of credit – they didn’t roll over and die like they did last year in a similar situation at Tennessee. I tell ya – one more defensive stand on Bama’s field goal drive in the second half, or one missed tackle on the ensuing kickoff and we would’ve had ourselves a brand new ball game.

For that matter, take away that roughing penalty on the first drive (the one that deleted that fumble) and maybe things are different. And ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have ourselves a merry Christmas…. Kill yourself with penalties, have a few bad breaks (missed catches and the fumble by AJ) and that adds up to a momentum killer. Knowshon wasn’t much of a factor, either, at least not after the first drive. Give Bama’s D-line the credit there, and for keeping pressure on Stafford.

All in all, a spectacular first half by Bama and nearly the same from Georgia in the second. The difference came down to the Dawgs not being able to keep the game from getting away in the first and Bama being able to put the game away in the second. But like I said way back before the season started, I expected a loss before the break. There’s still plenty of time and the schedule is favorable, especially if the season keeps to the same script as last year (remember the last week of September last year?), to book that trip to Miami. Now that we see that we’re not the titans we thought we were, I hope that there’s some soul-searching and retrospection that leads to some quality wins for the rest of the season.

So let’s see here, what teams lost last week? USC (Oregon St); Clemson (Maryland, who lost to Middle Tennessee St earlier); Florida (a choker to Ole Miss at the Swamp); Wisconsin (Michigan, who gutted it out); Weak, I mean Wake Forest (Navy, a true system program); Georgia (Alabama, the most complete team I’ve seen play); Illinois (Penn St, probable Rose Bowl participant). Those last two weren’t REALLY upsets, although the Bama game could have been seen that way. Penn St was the higher-rannked team. Oh, and UT lost to Auburn in the TO bowl. Sorry, had to include that one…. read this entry »

Well guys, I was going to give a live blog throughout UGA’s coming out party on Primetime TV against Arizona State. This god awful iteration of Windows called Vista had other ideas. I started to apply 10 updates about 15 minutes before kickoff and just got the laptop back up and functional. There’s 3 minutes left in the third quarter with Georgia leading 21-10.

Basically, I’m going to post and repeatedly update as the game goes along. What I’ve seen so far:

Knowshon is Knowshon. It’s getting good when that leap to the pylon wasn’t that spectacular (by comparison).

We’ve finally found the Robin to Massaquoi’s Batman, and his name is AJ Green. That kid’s the reason I said I was finally excited about UGA’s receiving corps last week. It’s about time they started really targeting him and making him part of the offense.

We’re killing ourselves with the hankies, but the refs aren’t helping. Don’t get me wrong, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot but some of those penalties are pure bullshit. Tripping on Massaquoi? Tripping WHO? And what was that bogus Leaping call on the first ASU field goal attempt? I have NEVER seen that called before. read this entry »