100 Days to Kickoff: u[sic]ga Opponent “Preview”

Today’s [insert school out east here] preview is sponsored by our friends at Section 103, where you can get hats, Haynes King shirseys, or some 1990 National Championship gear to remind the folks in Boulder who really won that title. Use code ‘FTRS’ for 10% off your order!

I’m gonna be honest with y’all. I don’t care if uga is any good this year. This is supposed to be an opponent preview, but I don’t have the time to dignify the effort for this particular team. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got 1980s

football to watch (sign up for my event with Coach Curry!) so I can fawn over Robert Lavette and Ted Roof. The last thing I want to do is think about a college in Athens, GA.

But yet, that is one thing us Jackets do over and over again isn’t it? We compare ourselves to them. We curse their team every waking moment we think about the Jackets. We really have let them live rent free in our heads for over a century. It’s the brilliance of deeply rooted rivalry. No matter how well you play or how many other more important things are going on in your life, that one team somewhere out there is always looming, ready to crush you with no remorse. No matter how far Greg Sankey will remove college football from its pure form, these stupid, agonizing, life giving, soul destroying, beacons of hope football rivalries won’t die.

For all of that, it should not be surprising that 2024’s edition of COFH still hits like a ton of bricks when I think about it. I thought I had already suffered enough after Super Bowl LI, the one moment I had in childhood to know what winning everything felt like. Apparently I haven’t. I don’t envy the very few people who are Falcons/Bills/GT fans, if that group happens to exist (although, we get plenty of NY students, so it’s possible). Every team but one loses at the end, but not every team loses like we did in a moment to climb the peak that’s been dodging us for years.

If I could remove one night of football watching from my life, it would be that night. Driving back from Athens at 2:30 in the morning with a parade of other attendees down Highway 29 was a special kind of sadness. They know they didn’t deserve that win, and they got it anyways. But, we exposed them that they weren’t as good as people thought they were, and eventually the got got.

In 2025, here’s what I do know about uga this year: they don’t match up to us at quarterback. In the most important position on the field, we have the upper hand. Between Gunnar Stockton vs. Haynes King debate, I’m taking King all day every day. Stockton of course should show some progress this year compared to getting thrown to the wolves against Notre Dame in a delayed Sugar Bowl after a tragedy. Their defense will be good, but honestly, I don’t care. Buster Faulkner has twice now sliced and diced uga’s defense with enough Haynes King sized surprises that I’m not betting against him again. We had them beat last year if it weren’t for a plethora of injuries to our secondary that wiped them out.

Georgia is a team that can be outplayed, and we’re the one team that has consistently shown how to make that happen in the last two seasons (on paper in 2023 before Bama took our gameplan and beat uga with it, and then on the field in 2024). Take a look at Game on Paper’s Binion Box from last year:

Aside from just not pressuring enough, a missed field goal, and stupid penalties and and and…ok whatever, they won, but the data is here to show Tech was measurably better by an EPA perspective. Tech aside from the Clemson game and potentially this game should be winning the EPA battle every game.

Georgia will be coming into this our game having most recently played Charlotte, but also #1 Texas before that. There’s absolutely a world where depending on how the the rest of their season goes (they play as of now ranked Ole Miss, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee as well), they could be fighting for a playoff spot because they aren’t going to the SEC Championship game. This game could be a de-facto play in game for one of those final at-large bids in the playoff. If you told me both teams were 10-1 or 9-2 going into this game, I’d believe that.

As mentioned before, this game will be played in Mercedes Benz Stadium, the first time a game in the series is taking place off campus since 1907 at Ponce De Leon Park. It’s going to take as many Jackets as possible to fill in the Benz to avoid losing any potential home field advantage we would’ve had in Bobby Dodd.

Let’s beat their ass.