But if Alabama is SEC — and college football — royalty, then the Bulldogs are the closest thing to a feel-good program that the conference can offer, something I learned firsthand as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

I thought I knew college football: I had come from Texas after growing up in the Midwest in what was then Big 8 Country. The man who would teach me most of what I know in journalism, however, showed me everything that was important about football in the South.

Plott Brice was an Atlanta native and a Georgia graduate who liked to say that he “learned to read on my granddaddy’s knee by turning the pages of the AJC.” He was a voracious reader, an accomplished bluegrass musician and an expert of all things newspapering. He handled hot type, laid out pages, covered Wimbledon and, as national editor, dispatched young reporters on ambitious assignments from Cuba and Romania to South Africa and the Soviet Union.

On Saturdays, however, Brice’s heart and soul belonged to the Georgia Bulldogs. There was nothing more sacred to him than the 60-mile pilgrimage to Sanford Stadium in Athens to watch the Dawgs do battle “between the hedges,” a nod to the privet hedges that have surrounded the field there since 1929.

Brice shared each game day with his wife and sisters and Larry Munson, the voice of Georgia football for over 40 years and a homer’s homer if there ever was one. Brice wore a transistor in his ear when he went to games and tuned his stereo to Munson when he was watching at home.

He had a tape of Munson’s most famous call, a 92-yard touchdown reception from the cinematically named quarterback Buck Belue to Lindsay Scott that beat Florida and kept Georgia’s 1980 national title drive alive. Years later, he still could recite it word for word.