Photo by Larry Wynn
Welcome to Auburn-Georgia Hate Week, everybody!
There’s that special chill in the air that says we’re getting deeper and deeper into fall. The holiday season is right around the corner and people are feeling festive. The Dawgs are glowing after a landmark win over the Gators on the banks of the Saint Johns River and all the Halloween candy is on sale, so go out and celebrate with a chocolate buffet!
Because it’s November, the month that Georgia and Auburn always meet on the gridiron. In November.
That’s right, folks, today is going to be a real “Old man yells at cloud” kind of day, so just get ready for it or get out!
(Okay, I’m sorry. Please don’t leave. I was being way too aggressive and I want to keep my website’s bounce rate very, very low.)
The annual interscholastic American football competition between the University of Georgia and Auburn University has also been called “The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry,” in order to differentiate it from “The South’s Oldest Rivalry,” which is, as we all well know, between the state of Alabama’s education system and basic arithmetic.
Since the game’s inception in 1892, which happened to be Georgia’s second ever football game, there have been 124 regular-season meetings* between the two teams. The 125th edition will kickoff this Saturday in Auburn, AL, the town as charming as Auburn, GA and with just as much to do.
You know what’s interesting? All but seven of these regular-season meetings have been played in November, one of those coming in the 2020 season with another to follow just two days from now. If you really want to get into the consistency of this thing, all but one of the regular-season games between the two teams from 1944 to 2019 have been played between November 10 and November 18.
For nearly 80 years, there was one week on the calendar reserved for this rivalry. When drug stores across the south printed calendars a few years in advance, they could block off holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Georgia-Auburn right away.
Now I could go on and explain the perspective of the bitter Georgia fan here. I could go into the reasons why the SEC decided to move this game around a little bit. So I will.
See, Auburn felt like it was just too hard to have to play Alabama and Georgia back-to-back on the road, and so they petitioned the SEC offices to move their date with Georgia to an earlier weekend. That’s why we now play Tennessee in November, which is equally ridiculous.
Auburn didn’t mind it so much when they beat Georgia and Alabama in the span of two weeks back in 2017, both in Jordan-Hare Stadium, but come 2018 it was just so difficult. What makes all of this even funnier is that the only reason Auburn has both of these games at home or on the road in a given year is because the SEC forced Georgia to play at Auburn two years in a row back in 2012 and 2013. The first one in 2012 was an absolute beat-down of the Tigers, and we loved every minute of it. It also made Aaron Murray the first (and probably only, to my knowledge) SEC quarterback to play three games in Jordan-Hare Stadium as a visitor in his college career.
Then in 2013, well…the less said about that game the better. Just remember that, when you’re going through life’s hardships and struggles, you should always knock the ball down.
“When I close my eyes, I still see the ball hanging there…floating in the air…never landing. Never landing.” (Photo by Larry Wynn)
Now imagine that the 2013 game had been played in Sanford Stadium instead of Jordan-Hare. Who knows if the outcome would have been different, but that’s where it was supposed to be in the first place. You could also play that game if you’re Auburn and ask, “What if the 2016 game we lost as heavy favorites had been in Auburn instead of Athens?” But they don’t get to ask that question because they didn’t have to inconvenience themselves with two consecutive road trips to Auburn in order to “balance out the schedule.”
So the SEC ultimately threw Auburn two gimmes in one series and royally messed up the schedule. Now that’s bad, but it isn’t the worst thing in the world.
See, the worst thing in the world is that the SEC is making some dangerous moves by switching up what has been one of the most consistent schedules in all of sports.
Think about it. How many other sporting events do you really equate with a date on the calendar? There’s obviously the Super Bowl, which comes at the end of the season in February, but it’s a championship game. It can’t go anywhere else.
What about the Daytona 500? That’s a great example. Nascar does something unique in that they start the season with their biggest event. It’s a huge deal and it is a tradition in sports that should not be meddled with. If you tried to move the Daytona 500 to a random weekend in June, fans would riot. And the city of Daytona probably would, too, because that tourism boost in February has to be something special for their economy, let me tell you.
There are only so many biker weeks and magician’s conventions you can fit in the winter schedule.
If you think I’m being overly romantic about the placement of one insignificant game and that I’m just a pessimistic old Georgia fan, you’d be wrong. Well…you’d be right, because I am guilty on both counts, but you’d also be wrong.
Let’s consider another storied rivalry in SEC football, even though it’s one that has been insanely lopsided for the last decade and change: Tennessee vs. Alabama. Does anyone know what they call that game? Any guesses in the crowd? Well, I’ll tell you. The game between Tennessee and Alabama is affectionately known as an orthodontist’s worst nightmare.
It’s also called “The Third Saturday in October.”
If you take your average SEC fan and ask them when Tennessee and Florida play, they’ll tell you it’s usually the third or fourth game of the season. If you ask your average fan when LSU and Alabama play, they’ll let you know that it’s often the first weekend in November.
What about Auburn and LSU? Georgia and Florida? Alabama and Auburn?
These are SEC rivalry games that you can set your watch to because they almost always fall on the same weekend, year after year, pandemic seasons withstanding.
Now let me pose another hypothetical. Ask your average ACC fan when Georgia Tech usually plays Clemson or Virginia Tech. Ask them when Florida State and Miami probably play. Ask them when Pitt and North Carolina often get together.
They won’t be able to tell you because these games don’t have a consistent placement. The ACC just throws darts at a board to make their schedule. Tech in recent years has opened their schedule against Clemson, Virginia Tech, Notre Dame, whoever. Sometimes they play Clemson the week of Georgia-Florida, sometimes they play in Week 5. The great battle for Florida’s soul between Miami and FSU has been at just about every stop on the schedule, too.
As for UNC and Pitt…who cares? I don’t even know if they do play on a regular basis.
I realize that it seems silly to bash the ACC over this, and I’m not necessarily doing that. The ACC can do whatever they want to do with their schedule, and that’s completely fine, but the SEC shouldn’t follow suit.
Some of the biggest rivalry games in all of college football are so special particularly because they are intimately tied to a specific weekend of the season. The classic Red River Shootout between Texas and Oklahoma coincides with the Texas State Fair in Dallas and is played at a neutral site. That’s a sacred game. The biggest of Big Ten rivalries, “The Game” between Ohio State and Michigan, is just one of the many bitter feuds that takes place on the last week of the regular season.
I’ve always thought it was interesting how the USC-Notre Dame game is usually one of two weekends based on whether they’re playing in South Bend, IN and want an early season game for weather or if they’re playing in Los Angeles and can enjoy a balmy November afternoon.
Then there’s the ever-impressive display of pageantry between Army and Navy, a game that always comes a week after Championship Saturday.
One of the reasons that the SEC stated for moving the Georgia-Auburn game to earlier in the season was so they could feature more division games late in the season when teams are fighting for conference championship spots.
But why does it matter? In the NFL, your division record is all that matters, so it makes some sense to have the back portion of your schedule so division heavy. In Major League Baseball, a 162-game season can come down to a couple of pitches in the first weekend of October, so of course it makes things more interesting between division rivals trying to make the playoffs. Just look at the recent Atlanta-Philadelphia series, which Atlanta swept, by the way, in order to secure the NL East for a fourth straight year.
In some sports, it makes sense for division games to take center stage at the end of the season.
In college football, it doesn’t change things one bit. Since it’s the overall SEC record, and not the division record, that settles who plays for the trophy in Atlanta, then it doesn’t matter when Georgia plays Tennessee. It doesn’t matter if Georgia has a non-division game late in the season against Auburn. Never mind the overall national picture and how one loss can derail the whole season, no matter when it happens.
A loss to Auburn is just as important on the SEC record in Week 9 as it is in Week 5 or earlier. It still paves the way for another team in your division if you lose a conference game late. It doesn’t matter which division the opponent is in.
Presumably the SEC heads are also trying to avoid the rematches that might happen between teams like Georgia and Auburn so late in the season, and also trying to spread out the marquee games for TV scheduling. So there are some semi-practical considerations, but I don’t think they do enough good to outweigh the negative consequences.
So why are we sacrificing one of the most unique aspects of the game and minimizing the pageantry of the sport in favor of mimicking a brand that just doesn’t resonate with fans the way it used to? Don’t get me wrong, the NFL is still one of the most popular brands in all of sports, but the product is not as dominantly popular as it used to be.
Oddly enough, this particular problem is one that might actually be solved by conference expansion one way or another.
With the additions of Texas A&M and Mizzou back in 2012, the SEC was able to put a little patch on their old scheduling system in order to keep things more or less status quo. There was still an 8-game conference schedule with one permanent cross-division rival. The only real change was that each team had to replace one of their two rotating cross-division games with the new in-division opponent: Texas A&M in the SEC-West and Mizzou in the SEC-East.
With the Longhorns of Texas and the Sooners of Oklahoma joining the league as soon as the SEC can write a check made out to the Big 12 that would make even T. Boone Pickens blush, the old system of doing things is going to have to undergo a massive overhaul.
Some folks are floating this idea of “Pods” rather than divisions, having four quadrants where teams are guaranteed to face their pod-mates every season, but then rotate their out-of-pod games more frequently. The main advantage of this plan is that it would allow for a four-year class to play at every SEC stadium and host every SEC opponent at least once. For the record, many pod projections actually place Georgia and Auburn in the same pod.
I don’t know if the pod will happen or if the SEC offices will add a ninth conference game or if Matthew McConaughey will drive a Lincoln to Birmingham and petition for Texas to play Vanderbilt three times in a season. What I do know is that the quickly forthcoming overhaul will give the SEC an opportunity to reprioritize the schedule, keeping the classic rivalry games in their classic spots.
There are some obvious games that nobody cares when they get played. I won’t deny that I really enjoyed the double-Tennessee swing of Georgia facing Vandy and Checkerboard U in back-to-back weeks for so many years, but that little feature isn’t crucial. I don’t really care if we face South Carolina in Week 2 or Week 10, even though I did get used to having them as our SEC opener every year.
But what I do care about is that we see Tennessee in mid-October, we see Florida within spitting distance of Halloween, and we get to see Auburn in the nippy November air when that late-season meeting has all the feelings of an elimination game, because the loser usually goes home with their dreams dashed on the turf.
(Obviously I want to keep the ACC rivalry against Tech in the Saturday after Thanksgiving, just like the other big in-state rivalries, but we’re not worried about non-conference games at this particular moment.)
I care about Alabama and LSU teeing off under the lights a week after the Georgia-Florida game. I care about the Egg Bowl being our season-ending dessert because life makes no sense. And I care about knowing the important bookmarks in the SEC schedule in perpetuity because that’s one of the intangibles that makes the SEC great.
There is no doubt that SEC football is the greatest brand in college football. The vaunted Big Ten with its history of bizarre rivalry trophies, another of my favorite traditions, has lost its place in the upper echelon. The Pac-12 used to be a two-horse race, but now they’ve turned into that little figure-eight thing at the rodeo and all the horses are loose, running over each other while the children are screaming from the grandstands. The Big 12…has like five teams left.
Being the best league in the sport is great for as long as it lasts, but the ESPN money tree will whither and die eventually. The national envy will shift focus to some up-and-coming android chess prodigy in a strange and distant future. When that happens, the storied tradition of SEC football is all that will save the league because the fans still love and enjoy the stability and the consistency of their beloved conference in a world overrun by robotic chess players.
We can’t be afraid to try new things. We can’t be afraid to change. If you ain’t growing, you dying. All of these things are true. But when you prune the vine, you still have to make sure you don’t cut the root.
“We can’t be afraid to try new things. But when you prune the vine, you still have to make sure you don’t cut the root.”
The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry belongs on a cool November evening when the sun sets at lunch time and the Cleveland Browns have already been mathematically eliminated from the NFL playoffs.
That’s the SEC football schedule I know and love, and that’s the brand of SEC football that we need to save.
Interesting Note
* The 2017 SEC Championship game featured a rematch between Georgia and Auburn on Dec. 2, a scant three weeks removed from the first meeting. Auburn won the regular-season meeting, a dreadful 40-17 drubbing on the plains, while Georgia manhandled Auburn in Mercedes-Benz Stadium in the only game we played in that stadium that season that matters.
Also of note, the possibility of a rematch in the SEC title game actually means that Georgia-Auburn could surpass “The South’s Oldest Rivalry,” a series between North Carolina and Virginia, for most meetings between the two teams. Georgia and Auburn have met for a total of 125 games as of today, 126 on Saturday, while UVA and UNC have already played their 126th meeting this season. Since UVA and UNC are in the same division in the ACC, there is no realistic scenario in which they can play twice in a season, barring the incredibly stupid outcome of them playing in a bowl game. That possibility is so unrealistic that it doesn’t merit mentioning. Which is why I mentioned it.