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.

*************



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.

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