This has been an extremely weird season in the SEC. Preseason #1 Texas will probably end up missing the playoff. Perennial tomato can Vanderbilt won 10 games for the first time in school history, and their
quarterback will probably get a Heisman ceremony invite. Alabama lost to Florida State, marking the first time it lost to a non-bowl-bound team since 2007. Six head coaches got pink slips, including a predictably disastrous and litigious end to the Brian Kelly era at LSU.* Marty Smith spent an entire Saturday in the Ole Miss athletic offices like some sort of cursed football Grail Knight.
With all this chaos, it’s nice to know that there’s one thing you can count on: This weekend, Georgia will once again play for a conference title. Kirby Smart’s teams have missed the SEC Championship game twice in his tenure: once in his first year and again during the Covid year. That’s a level of consistency fans of any other team in the country would love to have.
And yet.
Last Saturday, I watched the Iron Bowl with the demeanor of a man awaiting the results of an abnormal liver panel. Ashton Daniels threw the ball like he was trying to win tuition for veterinary school at halftime of a conference championship game, and his receivers had apparently all sprayed their hands down with Pam as some sort of bizarre pregame ritual. Even when Auburn mounted an improbable comeback, I knew with a metaphysical certainty that we were going to see the Tide again in Atlanta.
The last time Alabama lost in Atlanta was December 6, 2008. George W. Bush was the president. The #1 song on the Billboard Top 100 was “Live Your Life” by T.I. and Rihanna, and the #1 movie was the forgettable Reese Witherspoon vehicle Four Christmases. Matthew Stafford was still a student at UGA. A baby born that night is currently a high school senior, perhaps themselves applying to a college whose football team will one day drive them to the brink of madness.
As you already know, that streak includes four wins over Georgia in the SEC Championship. Speaking personally, each of those had a different flavor of anguish. There was the absolute soul-crushing agony of being so near a breakthrough (2012), the mind-shearing rage of another blown lead (2018), the stomach-churning disappointment of laying an egg (2021), and the icy fingers of inevitable death closing around the ol’ windpipe (2023).
Because I have work to do later and can’t start drinking room temperature gin right now, I will not mention the 2018 national championship, but please know that I am aware it was also played in Atlanta.
With the exception of 2021, each of those SECCG losses kept Georgia from playing for a national championship. This year, thanks to the expanded playoff format, UGA will get another bite at the apple even if things go sideways on Saturday afternoon. In fact, I’m sure a sizable number of Georgia fans would prefer to sit at home this weekend and let A&M and Bama beat up on each other while we prepare to host a home playoff game.
There’s a bigger conversation to be had here about the conference championships as a general proposition. Gone are the days when a team basically had to win a conference title to secure a championship game berth. Most years, both teams in the SECCG will end up in the playoff. Optimistically, you could say that’s because the SEC is the deepest conference and both teams will have earned their spots. Cynically, you might argue it’s because Greg Sankey and the league wield so much influence over the sport. Both are true.
The stakes of this meeting are undeniably lower than years past. The first-round bye that accompanies winning would be a plus, but it’s not do or die. Regardless of outcome, unless Georgia loses a galactic blowout or suffers a catastrophic quarterback injury, we’re probably going to host a first-round playoff game at minimum.
But if you’ve been keeping an eye on the site this week, you know most of the staff here wants to be in Atlanta this weekend. So, why should we care about this game?
Earlier this year, I wrote about the narrative value of a win over Alabama. That might be truer for Georgia than any other team in the country. Even Tennessee has beaten Alabama twice in the last four years. I can’t speak for the players, but as a fan, getting the Alabama ghost out of the attic would be huge. I can’t say I’m optimistic, necessarily, but I do believe the old football truism holds: It’s very hard to beat a good team twice.
But that’s not why I’m looking forward to this weekend.
A friend of mine recently observed that part of the NFL’s success over the last 20-plus years rests on the fact that NFL football is perfect background noise for a lazy Sunday at home. It’s easy and pleasant to just turn on a football game as you putter around the house. Diehard fans are unlikely to ever give up on football, so you don’t have to market the product to them. Instead, the NFL has become the dominant force in American sports by targeting growth among casuals.
College football lacks centralized leadership responsible for guiding its development and growth. The absence of a governing body results in a patchwork arrangement of entities that often work at cross-purposes. The NCAA clearly saw its role as protecting universities and athletic departments from having to compensate players, which makes the organization little more than a vestigial organ now with respect to football. Individual conferences exist to advance the interests of their member schools and their own branding. The College Football Playoff is a mechanism (sort of) for determining a national champion and (more accurately) marketing college football nationally.
To that end, without true leadership, the primary driver of college football’s future has been television, most specifically ESPN/Disney. As the Worldwide Leader has gobbled up more and more college football inventory for broadcast on Saturdays, it has likewise worked to turn the sport into a national product. You can see this in countless ways, but the clearest one is the network’s monomaniacal focus on the playoff. Does anyone really need or want a full month of playoff committee rankings shows? No — it’s all about marketing the sport to casuals.
Of course, you can’t make a decision like that without some tradeoffs. My favorite Georgia football blogger, the much-missed Senator Blutarsky, was fond of pointing out that college football’s glory was regionalism. The lack of a centralized authority allowed each conference, originally organized around geographical affinity, to develop its own character and traditions. As the sport becomes more national in focus and increasingly professionalized, much of that uniqueness will fall away. Because ESPN, the conferences, and their member schools stand to make more money from transforming college football fully into NFL-Lite, that’s what they’re going to do.
I try not to be overly sentimental or nostalgic for the glory days of college football. There’s nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls about the ancient and sacred nature of conference championships. In fact, the SEC Championship game is younger than I am. It’s also unlikely the conference championships are going anywhere in the near future because the ratings are still extremely strong. Last year, the SEC championship drew more viewers (16.6 million) than the most-watched regular-season game (13.2 million, also Georgia-Texas). That’s more viewers than every first-round playoff game and half the second-round games. As long as they draw that many eyeballs, they’re safe enough. But eventually, as the system develops to increasingly resemble the NFL’s structure, the individual conference championships won’t be worth preserving.
Since I’ve been a college football partisan, the first weekend in December has been the one of the emotional high points of the season. The goal was always to get to Atlanta first. But there will come a time soon when that’s no longer the case. Perhaps some fun stuff will come from that — more helmet matchups, more leeway for top teams to make the playoff, more, more, more. But embiggening the playoff will come at a price, even if it’s a small one.
So this weekend, I’m going to undertake my usual SEC Championship Game traditions. I’ll be using some of my post-Thanksgiving turkey stock to make a large batch of Victory Collards. I’ll be dragging my smoker out in freezing temperatures to smoke a few racks of ribs. I’ll be opening the last Classic City Lager in my fridge at kickoff, playing my tailgate playlist, and wearing my faded gray gameday hat.
Because I believe that, one day, Georgia will beat Alabama in Atlanta. And I’ll want to be full of ribs and collards and Georgia beer when we do. And I don’t know how many more chances we’ll get.
*It’s a testament to Kelly’s essential loathsomeness that his attempt to scapegoat his OC went so badly awry that he got himself fired.
