Enough is enough, and it's time for a change

It’s that time of the year again. Time for the Cocktail Party. Time for Georgia/Florida.

This season, it is undoubtedly a tale of two teams, as Georgia and Florida seem to be heading in opposite directions. Georgia, is 7-0 and ranked #3 in the nation. Florida is 3-3, and unranked.

In any season, there are games that could go either way. I have always been a believer that your record is the best indicator of what kind of team you are, but we can look and hypothesize a little as to what could have been.

For Georgia, we are living our best case scenario every week of 2017. You can’t really do any better than undefeated. When you look back at the first 7 games of the season, there was really only one game that Georgia was at risk of losing, and that would have been on the road to Notre Dame, who is currently ranked in the Top 10.

Again, the situation in Gainesville is much different. It is not an exaggeration to say that Florida is lucky to be 3-3. If it weren’t for Butch Jones and Tennessee finding a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Florida would have lost to the Vols. Kentucky had Florida beat as well, but they failed to guard a wide receiver on two separate plays in the fourth quarter that directly lead to touchdowns in what turned out to be a one point loss for the Wildcats. So, if you look at the worst case scenario for Florida, you see that the Gators are three plays away from being 1-5.

I say all of this to make the most obvious point anyone could make heading into the game this weekend:

Georgia is a far better team than Florida.

Alright! This is the fun blog! This is where we get to talk about how Georgia is going to dominate the Gators.

Wrong. This is the blog where we talk about how being the better team hasn’t worked out so well for Georgia in Jacksonville.

Now, the premise of this idea is that Georgia had to be the superior team, so we are throwing out all of the Spurrier era. From 1990-2001, Florida was a much better program and fielded much better teams than Georgia. Even though Georgia upset Florida in 1997, they weren’t the better team.

Hold on, here we go down bad memory lane.

2002: Georgia is undefeated coming into Jacksonville. Georgia fails to convert on 3^rd down throughout the entire game, going something like 0-13 on third down. Even still, Georgia has a chance to win the game, but Terrence Edwards, one of the greatest receievers in the school’s history, drops a critical pass towards the end of the game that sealed Georgia’s fate. The Dawgs end up 13-1, win the SEC title, and the Sugar Bowl, but couldn’t beat Florida.

2003: Georgia is again the better team, and again the Dawgs would fall to Florida. This time, the Gators kick a field goal late to win. Georgia goes 12-3 and loses to eventual national champion LSU twice that season, once in Baton Rouge and once in Atlanta in the SEC title game.

2005: Georgia limps into Jacksonville with starting quarterback DJ Shockley injured. Joe T 3 was average at best for the Dawgs as Florida scored on their first two offensive possessions and held on two win 14-10. Georgia again wins the SEC title, but fails to beat Florida.

2008: I’m not sure this game quite fits in this category because the 2008 Dawgs lost four games overall and the 2008 Gators won the National Championship. However, it makes the list because Georgia was the preseason #1 team in the nation and featured Stafford, Moreno, and AJ Greene. Florida embarrassed Georgia, 49-10 to get their season back on track and send the Dawgs into a tail spin that lasted the better part of 4 seasons.

2014: This is the game that will be referenced time and time again over the next few days. Georgia enters the game as big favorites (10 points). Florida was reeling, and it was a foregone conclusion that Will Muschamp would be fired at the end of the season. Georgia scored early with Nick Chubb to take a 7-0 lead, then Florida scored the next 31 points en route to a mind-blowing 38-20 win. Florida ran all over Georgia. By the end of the afternoon, Kelvin Taylor and Matt Jones combined to rush for 389 yards and four touchdowns. As a team Florida ran for 436 yards. To illustrate just how one dimensional Florida was, the Gators completed only 3 passes on the day for 27 total yards.  

2015: Jacksonville will always be Mark Richt’s Waterloo, but the 2015 game got him fired. Georgia was limping through the month of October, with quarterbacks Bryce Ramsey and Grayson Lambert both showing they sucked. So Richt went with Faton Bauta against the Gators to bring a running dynamic to the game. However, rather than have Bauta run, Georgia ran their normal offense with a quarterback that was worse at throwing the ball than their normal sucky quarterbacks. Bauta, the running quarterback threw the ball 33 inexplicable times and Georgia lost to Florida 27-3. How do I know that this was the game that cost Richt his job? Georgia won the rest of the games in 2015 to finish the season 9-3, so the loss in Jacksonville must have been the breaking point.

That brings us to 2017. Once again, Georgia is the better team, but will it matter? Georgia is 5-11 against Florida since 2001. In at least 5 of those 11 losses, Georgia was the better team. If we are being honest, Florida is a program that is living off the Spurrier error, along with about 4 really good years (the Tebow years) under Urban Meyer. Florida hasn’t been great in a long time, but Georgia still can’t manage to get the job done.

Everything about this season feels different, but the biggest test to see how much has changed may come Saturday afternoon at 3:30. Georgia will probably go to the SEC title game, win or lose, but a loss will mean that the more things change for Georgia, the more things in Jacksonville stay the same.