Happy Championship game Saturday Dawg Nation!
No, not the national championship, but the SEC Championship. And yes, I don’t give a damn what the naysayers say - this game still matters. It matters a lot. In recent years, this game has often times been far more exciting than the national championship game has been and for good reason. The best conference in college football never fails to put on a huge show in this game. Many great memories in this game going back a long time, I’m sure for all of us, will be stirred up today as the Dawgs take the field. But we are playing for more than SEC pride in this game. We are playing for the honor of saying for the 15th time since the SEC Championship began in 1992, we are the best team in the SEC and also playing very significantly for the comfort of a first round bye that lets us miss a potentially cold weather game up here in the upper midwest and enjoy a New Year’s Six playoff bowl in a warm weather location or a dome. That should be enough to motivate every Dawg on the field that was not enjoying the cold temperature against Tech in Athens last week.
Can we just stop, pause, and say what an unbelievable honor it is to be where we are and tip our hats to the effort of this team this season? UGA got through what has now been proven to be the toughest schedule in college football this season with quite frankly, not the strongest quad Kirby has fielded during his tenure at UGA, but he has coached them up to get them through three road games against top 15 ranked teams and secured home field for another season to sit us at 10-2 with a lock into a playoff run. That’s pretty incredible. We will be the away team wearing whites and the silver britches and Texas in the burnt orange and they’re leaving their damn steer at home.
The general rookie-level narrative this week has been that it is hard to win a rematch against the same team in one season. Maybe, maybe not. Rematches are rare - you don’t get to see them very often in this sport, so we do not have a wide body of examples to look at in CFB to try to draw any conclusions. Usually we get them in a conference championship game or (prior to this year) a four team playoff matchup which naturally yielded higher stakes and a more amped up game than you would get in an NFL rematch where the division teams play each other at least twice in the same season. I guess I am not really one who is on the its-tough-to-win-rematches bandwagon. I think its just tough to win in the SEC - period. I think this game comes down to another chess match between one of the best offensive minds in college football vs. one of the greatest defensive minds college football has ever seen.
Texas is definitely playing better more complete football than they were playing when we first matched up this season, especially on the ground game. Starting the season with several injuries in their running back room put more emphasis on Ewers in the passing game and we saw a lot of experimentation from Sarkisian. I think now with the ground game where they want it to be, it has balanced their offense out nicely and has taken a lot of the pressure we saw in the first game off of Ewers to make things happen and force the ball down field. How much will we see Arch? Big question. First of all, there is no question that Ewers is playing with an injured ankle and shoulder. No one who watched the A&M game believed that Ewers is playing at anything resembling full strength, so that automatically should put us an Arch alert. Secondly, our defense has been getting slashed on the ground in the last two games and our defenses (year over year) have struggled mightily to wrap up a dual threat QB. Haynes King had more yards on the ground against our defense than all of our running backs had combined for positive yardage. Sark knows this, and I think we see a big dose of Arch in red zone packages like they did against A&M because of his dynamic capabilities as a true dual threat. No matter who finishes the game with more time at the helm, Texas is going to be tough to stop today.
What about us? What do we do to surprise Texas and take the momentum away? Obviously, the ideal 1-2 combo that would stun them is to get a quick 10 or 14 points on the board while our defense applies constant pressure on the QB to force some quick 3 and outs. The first of those two is going mean that our wide receivers have to……wide receive. We are going to struggle to run the ball, as we have all season. Our ground game this year is about as invigorating as a day old watered down coca cola in melted ice. We have a workhorse running back room that is going to be satisfied with 4.5 yards per carry and chopping wood the hard, non-flashy way to assist our passing game to carry the heavy load. If I see one breakout run for 25 yards in this game from Frazier or Etienne (assuming he plays), I’ll be absolutely shocked. This one is going to be on Carson to carry us, like it has been all season. Avoid the slow start, get quick points on the board, and apply constant pressure Ewers. If we succeed in doing that, we are going to be tough to beat, not just by Texas, but by anyone.
If there’s a game that we need #11 to finally step up, it’s this one.
Kirby is the master at these situations and I ain't betting against him. I’m taking us to win this one in a hard fought scrap, 31-28.
LETS GO GET THAT SEC TITLE!
GO DAWGS! GATA! SIC EM!!!! WOOF WOOF WOOF
Game & Broadcast Info:
- Kickoff: Saturday, December 7 – 4:00 p.m. ET
- Location: Mercedes-Benz Stadium (75,000) | Atlanta, Ga.
- 2024 Records: Georgia (10-2, 6-2 SEC), Texas (11-1, 7-1)
- 2024 Rankings: Georgia #7 AP (#5 CFP), Texas #3 AP (#2 CFP)
- TV: ABC (Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, Holly Rowe, Laura Rutledge)
- Video Stream:
ESPN+
- Radio: 95.5 FM WSB – Bulldog Network |
Affiliates
| Scott Howard (PxP), Eric Zeier (Color), DJ Shockley (sideline)
- Audio Stream:
georgiadogs.com
- Satellite: SiriusXM (TBA)
- Web Stats:
georgiadogs.com
- Twitter: #UGAvsTEX
- SECN ReBroadcast: TBA
- History:
Georgia vs. Texas All-Time Series Results: Texas 4-2
- Last Meeting: UGA won 30-15 in Austin, Tex., 10/19/2024
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