Georgia football rivalry with Alabama exactly what SEC needs
The growing Georgia football rivalry with the Alabama Crimson Tide is precisely what the SEC needs to push the conference back up to a place of college football dominance.
The Georgia football win on National Signing day is the latest chapter in the growing rivalry between the Bulldogs and Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide. While recruiting wins don’t always translate into rings, Georgia’s budding dogfight with Alabama has helped to rejuvenate the rest of the SEC.
Since the tail end of the BCS era, heading in the current time of the College Football Playoff, the SEC lost some ground to other conferences when it comes to college football dominance.
This isn’t to say the SEC lost a step, but it was more about other conferences imitating what brought success to the SEC, and poaching a lot of their best coaches. The ACC and Big Ten, in particular, did a lot to close the gap with the SEC.
Since 2014, most of the nation has viewed the SEC as being Alabama … and then everyone else, with caricatures of a Crimson Tide mascot literally carrying the rest of the conference on its shoulders being a common sight.
There is some truth to that narrative. Yes, there were other good teams in the SEC, but most of them were in the West Division with Alabama, and cannibalism within that division nullified the ability to see just how good they really were.
The East division had been a tire fire in recent years – a smoldering mess of inconsistency and poorly coached teams. The fact that Florida won back-to-back East crowns with what we now know was a subpar head coach and zero offense is a clear indicator of just how pedestrian most teams in the East had become.
Outside of Auburn (and at times LSU), Alabama really had no one to challenge their right to the throne, and it made the SEC look like a pond full of little fish.
Over the years Nick Saban has been at Alabama, he’s sent coordinators and other members of his coaching staff to various programs (and on to the NFL), with equally varying results. No one who has come from the Saban coaching tree has really come back to haunt their one-time mentor.
Until 2017.
A New Georgia Football Rivalry Takes Root
Despite being neighbors separated by only four hours, Georgia and Alabama are not natural rivals. Including this year’s national title game, the two have only met 68 times in their entire lengthy football histories, and generally, only play every few years at most during the regular season.
Alabama is always more concerned with the Iron Bowl against Auburn, while Georgia focuses its rivalry venom on the Cocktail Party with the Florida Gators. That’s not to say the games between the Bulldogs and Tide don’t usually have some meaning, but the anticipation for UGA-Bama contests with fans is only heightened in the week prior to kickoff.
But Kirby Smart added new elements to fuel the rivalry fire. A former Saban assistant who – when seasons go as planned – could potentially meet Alabama on a pretty regular basis in the conference championship game, with Auburn there to be the late-season foil for both sides of the equation. The pupil-teacher dynamic between these two could reach monumental heights.
Obi-Wan vs Vader. Batman vs Ra’s al Ghul. Fast Eddie Felson vs Vincent the Kid.
Smart vs Saban.
(Tell me you didn’t just see Kirby Smart saying “Only a master of evil, Nick.”)
Building Georgia Football Into the Beast of the East
Kirby Smart left Saban’s staff in 2016 after nine years at Alabama to return to his alma mater. His charge was to recreate what Saban had done in Tuscaloosa and push the Georgia Bulldogs to the next level – a feat which the comparatively successful Mark Richt had been unable to do in 15 years in Athens.
Richt left a lot of valuable pieces for Smart, including some of the best running backs a school known for great running backs had ever seen – Sony Michel and Nick Chubb – along with some young talent at quarterback and on the defensive side of the ball.
Smart’s first season came with mixed reviews, but as is the case with any first-year head coach, leeway is easily found among fans and alumni. But Smart knew improvement had to be evident in year two.
Improvement ended up being an understatement.
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Call it lightning in a bottle, or kismet, or the planets being aligned. Call it whatever you like. From the moment starting Georgia quarterback Jacob Eason went down with an injury in the first game of the season and was replaced by true freshman Jake Fromm, Georgia looked to be unstoppable.
Well, there was that minor speed bump in Auburn, but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is, it was evident that whatever Kirby Smart had planned to supposedly “slowly turn the ship” had morphed into a turbo-powered speedboat cutting tight corners on a hydroplaning dime.
Georgia was on course for more than most fans had hoped, and as each week passed, those hopes stretched further into the college football postseason calendar.
The eventual meeting with Alabama in the College Football Playoff started out as a murmur in late September, when the Bulldogs dismantled Tennessee with extreme prejudice. By the time the Dawgs had taken Florida to the same woodshed in late October, that murmur had become a rallying cry from both sides, once more touting the strength of the SEC.
Both the Bulldogs and the Crimson Tide overcame regular-season losses to Auburn and some key injuries to find their way to the playoff, and to claim half of the four-team tournament for the conference everyone loves to hate.
SEC fans were once again beating their chests and sounding barbaric yawps which would have made Walt Whitman jealous. The collision course for the Dawgs and Tide was set, and the national SEC-overload hit critical mass.
This…this is what the SEC needed.
A pair of powerhouses on opposite sides of the conference, evening out what had been a top-heavy league, and assuring that no single team would carry the weight of expectations for the rest.
Colin Cowherd and every other media member or fan who goes around with the phrase “SEC bias” on their lips, or who cringes at the thought of another SEC program being Sabanized, can whine until their tears turn into a wading pool of sorrow. Bad for college football? Not even close.
A near-decade of SEC dominance in the early 2000s caused a surge of college football improvement nationwide, and if it happens again, fans from programs everywhere can thank the object of their ire once again.
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Having Georgia and Alabama at each other’s throats while both being dominant national forces may send the college football universe spinning into a dimension of pissed-off never before seen, but it will be well worth it in the long run.