Why I despise the Georgia Bulldogs and why you should, too

I am told there are people in this world – Gator fans mind you – who say they always cheer for Southeastern Conference teams when they’re playing a non-SEC opponent. For the most part, I agree except for one slight deviation and that is to never, under any circumstance, pull for the University of Georgia unless it can help the University of Florida win a championship. For example, let’s say Florida and Tennessee are tied for the SEC East lead in football and the Vols are playing Georgia. If a Georgia win means the Gators win the SEC East, then I will, ever so grudgingly, pull for Georgia.

But I feel dirty after I’ve done it.

Simply saying I don’t like Georgia would be one of the all-time understatements. Saying I hate Georgia is far closer to reality but lacks intensity. Imagine this: the white hot heat of ten thousand suns. You’re in the same neighborhood.

I am so repulsed by the University of Georgia that I have wondered why it is General William Tecumseh Sherman didn’t detour from his march to Savannah to burn down everything in Athens and Clarke County then salt the earth so nothing would grow there for a hundred years. And why is it that allegedly well-educated people who are graduates of what is supposedly a world class university proudly call their team the Dawgs? The rest of the world sees that and thinks what a bunch of functioning illiterate rednecks. So, let the big dog spell!

For those of you who think that it’s cute to say Dawg or that Georgia’s not so bad the next 364 days after the Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville, allow me to offer you a refresher course in why despising the Georgia Bulldogs should resonate to the very core of your being. If it does not, then you have somehow missed the Gator standard. By a wide margin.

1. THE 1942 GAME:

I wasn’t even an idea in 1942 when my father was a 17-year-old freshman on the University of Florida campus, biding his time until he was 18 so he could enlist in the Navy. At UF as in most campuses across the nation, the physically able athletes signed up to fight the Germans and Japanese within weeks of Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, what was expected to be a very good University of Florida football team was decimated. The 1941 Gators had finished 4-6, but five of the six losses were by six or fewer points and in the final three games, UF beat Miami and Georgia then lost by three to UCLA.

Coach Thomas Lieb’s 1942 Gators were a shell of the team that was envisioned prior to Pearl Harbor. The Gators were a team made up mostly of players either too young to enlist or ones who couldn’t pass the military physical. Meanwhile up at Georgia, Wally Butts assembled a dream team. Georgia had one of the best ROTC programs in the country and had been selected for a Navy Pre-Flight program. As players from around the country poured into Athens for Pre-Flight and ROTC, Georgia’s already strong roster became stacked. The roster included “Flatfoot” Frankie Sinkwich, who would win the Heisman Trophy; Charlie Trippi, who would win MVP of the Rose Bowl and probably should have won the Heisman in 1946 when he came back from military service; George Poschner, an All-American end who became a war hero at the Battle of the Bulge; and Gene Ellenson, a great defensive lineman who would win a pair of Silver Stars for heroism at the Battle of the Bulge and would later become the defensive coordinator at the University of Florida.

The Gators limped into Jacksonville (Florida-Georgia was played at Fairfield Stadium) losers of three straight while Georgia had won seven in a row and was fresh off a 21-10 win over 3rd-ranked Alabama. No one in his right mind gave the Gators a chance and for good reason.

The game was essentially over before it began, but Georgia poured it on from the opening kickoff and even with the score mounting in the third quarter, Butts never saw fit to put in his second and third teamers. Sinkwich, Trippi, Poschner and Ellenson were still in the game late in the fourth quarter. The final score was 75-0. Florida finished the season 3-7 and wouldn’t have a break-even season again until 1948. Georgia beat UCLA to win the Rose Bowl and a piece of the national championship.

My dad and other Gators I talked to who were part of that greatest generation that went on to serve our nation and win a war in Europe and the Pacific, never forgot how Wally Butts chose to humiliate the Gators when it was obvious UF could offer little to no resistance. Every single one of them was bitter and the mention of Wally Butts made their blood boil.

2. THE 1968 GAME:

Florida was picked in the preseason to win the SEC for the first time and finish top five nationally. The season began well with four straight wins and a No. 7 ranking but on a rainy day in the mud in Chapel Hill the Gators fumbled seven times and lost to North Carolina. The bottom fell out of the season that day. The Gators tied Vanderbilt in Nashville, then lost to Auburn on Homecoming. By the time the Georgia game arrived, UF was 4-2-1 and spiraling downward. Georgia, meanwhile, was 5-0-2, ranked 9th and closing in on Vince Dooley’s second SEC championship.

Florida was a team with issues that had much to do with a quarterback controversy that divided the offense almost straight down the middle. Half wanted Larry Rentz while the other half wanted Jackie Eckdahl. On the other side of the locker room, defensive players were angry because they thought the offensive players were selfish to allow such a controversy to split loyalties.

Making matters worse, a few days before the Florida-Georgia game, play caller and offensive backfield coach Fred Pancoast was hospitalized for an appendectomy. Feeling the need to shake up the team Ray Graves made the decision to swap coordinators – Ed Kensler became the defensive coordinator and Gene Ellenson became the offensive coordinator.

About the only thing shaken up was the team’s confidence.

Game day was cold, rainy and downright miserable. I was working for the Gainesville Sun at that time but press box space at the old Gator Bowl was limited. My boss, Joe Halberstein, got me a ticket to watch but I wasn’t there to write. By the second quarter, my rain gear was completely inadequate, I was soaked to the core and freezing.

Georgia arrived at the Gator Bowl on a seek and destroy mission. Mike Cavan ran the offense to perfection and Georgia’s defense, led by future College Football Hall of Famers Bill Stanfill and Jake Scott, made the Gators pay on nearly every play. It was 41-0 at the half. The Gators didn’t cross midfield until the third quarter.

In the final minute of the game with the score 48-0, Georgia faced a fourth down when one of the players on the team approached Dooley and told him he hadn’t kicked a field goal since high school. Dooley called time out, sent his center in to kick the field goal that nailed down the final humiliation points in a 51-0 beatdown that will go down as one of the worst in Florida football history.

As was his habit on Saturdays upon seeing the Florida football score, San Francisco 49ers backup QB Steve Spurrier called Ellenson to talk about the game. If you’ve ever wondered why Spurrier was obsessed with running up the score on Georgia whenever he had the chance, the conversation he had with Coach Ellenson is the reason.

Remember when Spurrier ran it up in Athens in 1995? Do you remember Eric Kresser throwing two touchdown passes in the fourth quarter, the last one with 1:21 remaining that put the Gators ahead 52-17? Remember Spurrier saying he wanted to be the first coach to hang “half a hundred” on Georgia in Sanford Stadium? Think back to 1968 and you’ve got the reason. Coach Ellenson wasn’t alive for Spurrier to call with congratulations but a call was made to Coach Graves to say “this one’s for you.”

3. THE PROBATION YEARS:

Okay, we’ll start with the obvious. Florida got nailed by the NCAA not just once, but twice. The first time, the Gators were hit with 109 violations, some of them as heinous as Dale Dorminey going back to Pensacola with a T-shirt and Hoss Adams buying him a pack of Juicy Fruit and a Sprite while waiting on the plane at the Gainesville airport. Hanging offenses! Now there were some violations that were pretty bad, but the majority were of the nickel and dime variety. For that Charley Pell was fired and the SEC championship the 1984 Gators won on the field was forfeited (more on that later). The second probation was for Galen Hall allegedly paying a month or so of child support for Jarvis Williams.

At the same time the NCAA dropped the hammer on Florida (two years of probation without TV; maximum 12 in recruiting classes for consecutive years), Florida State, Tennessee, Auburn and Georgia all got slaps on the wrist. You see, the NCAA is quite selective about who it chooses to punish. For landing Herschel Walker – allegedly sold to the highest bidder – Georgia lost two scholarships. That’s a rather small price to pay for perhaps the greatest college football player of all time who led Georgia to one national and three SEC championships. It turns out that at the time the Georgia was being investigated, Vince Dooley was chairman of the NCAA television committee. Coincidence that Georgia was given a pass? Rumors persist that Dooley lobbied long and hard to ensure the penalties for Georgia’s transgressions were light.

Georgia fans will tell you Vince Dooley is a man of the highest possible integrity, so explain why Georgia went on football probation three times (1965, 1978, 1982) while he was the coach and again in 1997 while he was the AD. He’s the guy who hired Hugh Durham and Jim Harrick, who both put Georgia basketball in the NCAA jailhouse.

Dooley is also the same guy who allowed a serious academic fraud scandal to go on right under his nose. Google Jan Kemp sometime and read the details about how she got fired because she wouldn’t give athletes passing grades. She was fired but she sued and won a $1.08 million settlement.

All this is relevant for Gators because Vince Dooley was among the leaders of the vote to strip Florida of the 1984 SEC title won on the field. Florida, by the way, destroyed Georgia on the field in 1984, 27-0.

Years ago, I did a magazine article with College Football Hall of Famer and Gator great Wilber Marshall. When we got around to the subject of recruiting Wilber said, “I went to Florida because it was close to home and I’m a mama’s boy. I didn’t go there because they paid me to go but other schools made offers – some big offers – some of the same teams that voted to strip the SEC championship from us in 1984. You would go on recruiting trips and some fat cat booster would let you know what you could expect. That was pretty common then.”

When I mentioned Georgia, Wilber laughed rather sarcastically.

The NCAA, in its infinite wisdom, hung a probation on Steve Spurrier’s first Florida team for something that happened during the Galen Hall years. Not a single player on that 1990 Florida roster was even on the team when Hall allegedly paid the child support for Jarvis Williams. Galen has always denied he did it. There were stories that he did pay the cash but the next morning Jarvis’ mom drove over from Palatka to pay him back. None of that was ever substantiated. What’s interesting is the NCAA never offered any real proof that Galen had done it.

For that alleged crime, Galen was fired during the 1989 season. The Florida AD at the time (Bill Arnsparger) refused to fight the allegations but was very quick to fire Galen. Arnsparger saw this as the perfect opportunity to hire Mike Archer, who had succeeded him as the HBC at LSU. He would have done it if not for powerful Florida boosters like Ben Hill Griffin, who put him in his place.

The NCAA gave Florida a bowl ban. The SEC athletic directors voted that Florida was ineligible to win the SEC championship even though the Gators won it on the field. You’ll never guess in a million years who was at the forefront of keeping the Gators from winning the SEC title.

Go to the head of the class if your answer was Vince Dooley.

Punishment should always fit the crime. It could be argued that what Florida did in 1984 deserved time in the NCAA jailhouse, but if that’s the case, why was Florida’s punishment so tough and the punishment to FSU (a couple of scholarships lost), Tennessee (something similar) and Georgia nothing more than a pop on the fanny and the NCAA saying “be good boys and don’t do this again”?

And why was it so important for Vince Dooley to go to the mat to have the Gators stripped of the 1984 SEC title and then prevent the 1990 team from winning it? After all, this is the same Vince Dooley whose history of cheating dated back to 1965. His 1966 and 1968 SEC titles were never stripped. The only logical answer is that Dooley was determined to keep Florida down as long as he could. He might have succeeded except that he hired Ray Goff as his successor and Spurrier was hired at Florida over Arnsparger’s objections.

Hiring Spurrier changed everything and tilted the rivalry advantages strongly in Florida’s favor. The Head Ball Coach understood the hypocrisy and he knew the history. That has everything to do with why he took such delight in sticking it to Georgia (11 wins in 12 years; average margin of victory 23.36 points) every chance he got. Ron Zook beat Georgia two-out-of-three and might have made it three-for-three if he hadn’t been fired the Monday prior to the 2004 Georgia game. He still almost won that one. As a Spurrier assistant for five years (1991-95) Zook was well versed in what beating Georgia meant and why it was so important. Urban Meyer wasn’t around for the Spurrier years but he understood it too. He beat Georgia five times in six seasons. He knew all about the recruiting advantages for beating Georgia and he had been well versed in the history of the rivalry.

In the years since Urban Meyer left Florida in 2010, the Florida-Georgia rivalry has tilted heavily in Georgia’s favor. Florida has won only four times including 2020 when Kyle Trask lit up Georgia’s vaunted defense for 474 yards and four touchdown passes.

Georgia is a 7.5-point favorite this year, but logically it seems it should be more. Billy Napier was fired after the Mississippi State win two weeks ago and Billy Gonzales is the interim. Turmoil at Florida, it would seem, would give Georgia a greater advantage, but perhaps the people who set the betting lines believe the Gators are going to show up with a vengeance and play like a team with its hair on fire.

But no matter what happens Saturday, whether the Gators win or lose, it won’t change my intense disdain for the University of Georgia. No matter the sport, my favorite teams are the Florida Gators and whoever Georgia is playing. Nothing and nobody will ever change that.