I have loved college football since I was single digits old and trips to my grandparents In Rabun Gap, GA let me know that the Georgia Bulldogs were the team this family followed. It was relayed to me most strongly by my father, who began his college life in Athens, and my Uncle Butch, who spent all of his college days there and never really left as he reached the level of booster and superfan.
It was Butch who took me to my first college football game, the 1973 Peach Bowl featuring the Dawgs against
the Maryland Terrapins led by future Dallas Cowboy Super Bowl MVP Randy White. Georgia featured Jimmy “The Greek” Poulos at running back and dual-threat quarterback Andy Johnson, though to be fair, with his 35.8% completion rate, 6 TD’s against 9 picks and only two receivers with over 10 catches (11 & 12 respectively), running was his only true threat as the team’s 3rd leading rusher.
The game wasn’t what you’d call pretty.
Georgia was outgained 461 to 314, there were 7 total turnovers and the two teams managed only 26 combined first downs. The Dawgs gave up a 68-yard TD pass, Maryland’s only touchdown, but Poulos and Johnson each scored for Georgia and, more importantly, the Junkyard Dawg defense stopped Maryland FIVE times inside Georgia’s 15-yard-line. When the gun sounded, they had carried the night by a score of 17-16 and won a steel football with a basket of fruit attached.
It was beautiful.
Anyway, life went on. We were living in Asheville, NC at the time where we were only about an hour & half or so from Rabun Gap, GA where mom’s family was dug in. Four years after that game, we would move to Omaha and five years after that, I would drag some clothes and other belongings to the Phi Delt house in Lincoln and begin life as a Nebraska Cornhusker.
After a couple of years on campus, I’d be fully living the Husker life which still – and obviously if you follow Corn Nation at all – owns me to this day. The two teams have done a good job of avoiding each other with the exception of the 2013 & 2014 Capital One Bowls. They weren’t fun at all. It was like watching your current best friend fight your old best friend who you still really liked, but fell out of touch with a little bit. It wasn’t Georgia whose depth charts and stats I was studying rigorously anymore. I was following and watching all their games I could. But I was writing for Corn Nation not Dawg Sports.
Things got more interesting a few years ago. Uncle Butch had married a wonderful woman named Kay who had been widowed. When my ex-wife, pregnant with future Corn Nation scribe Mylie Ketterson, and I went down to Rabun Gap for my grandfather’s 90th birthday, we met Kay and her kin including her sons Rob and Allyn. Rob and his wife Sherrie, both collegiate athletes, a few years later would put those genes to work when they bore a son named Gunner.
For those of you who don’t follow much football outside of Nebraska or the Big 10, he is today a junior at Georgia and holds the role of starting quarterback for their football team. I’m not here today to write his biography, but I can assure he is doing well. You can CLICK HERE for a look at his stats or HERE to see how he ranks in QB Rating in the SEC (Spoiler: He’s 1st) and some of the big names below him. He also leads the nation among QB’s in comebacks of 7 pts or more engineered.
Fine, there’s a little bit of bio.
And it’s time to tie this all up just in case I still have any fellow Huskers on board.
So why in the hell am I yammering to a bunch of Nebraska fans about a 1973 bowl game which allowed Georgia to end their season 7-4-1? And about Georgia’s quarterback who you’re highly unlikely to ever see lined up across from the Huskers
Well, because it plays into a little advisory list I wanted to make for Husker fans. Just what is there to do during a bye week? They are done in the spirit of two of my favorite writers – Dan Jenkins of Fort Worth, TX, sportswriter extraordinaire especially in the arenas of college football and golf & Mike Royko of Chicago, an unrivaled editorialist who delved in sports on occasion.
Here are some of my suggestions to ensure a calm, relaxing bye-week concluding with how I’m going to bollocks it all up for myself:
1) Write your short autobiography – “Why It’s So Damn Important the Little Animal on the Breast of My Blazer Beats the Little Animal on Yours.”
2) Grab a soup cookbook from the library and make a different soup every day Monday-Friday. Because who doesn’t love soup?
3) Clean up the giant soup mess in your kitchen. You really should’ve been doing this each day. Good grief, look at that kitchen.
4) Grab that book you’ve been meaning to read forever from the library. It will make make a wonderful coaster for your drinks when you read the first 6 pages then decide to watch the movie on Hulu instead.
5) Many people in the world irritate you. Pick your top 10 or 15 and write them all letters telling them why you hate them and what horrible things you wish karma would visit upon them personally. It will be extremely cathartic as well expanding your imagination in ways you’ve never dreamed possible!
6) Take a week off and drink heavily. Do it at home where it’s cheaper and friends don’t have to toss your slurring remains into an Uber each night. Stock up and whenever you run out, bite the cork off another bottle and keep going. Hit the sack early Friday and be ready for #8.
7) If you combine 5 & 6, you may actually end up putting stamps on those letters and throwing them in the mail. It’s certainly not what I’d recommend (the legal dept. told me I had to say that), but if you do, I can promise your life will shortly be filled with excitement!
8) Spend a nice leisurely Saturday watching college football with nary a care. There’ll be no watching a nail-biter to the finish of a Huskers squad which has been in one-score games six times this season. May I suggest Oklahoma-Alabama, Pittsburgh-Notre Dame or Southern Cal-Iowa, all matchups today between ranked teams..
9) I myself am going to spit right in the mouth of my own advice and watch Georgia vs. Texas, which will absolutely delete the purpose of everything above. Like many in the Cornhusker state, I despise the Texas Longhorns. Combine that with my love of the Dawgs, especially with Gunner in the fray, and there’s a good chance my sanity and adrenaline will redline repeatedly. Don’t you judge me – it’s just who I am.
10) Feel like joining me just get in on the Texas hate? Game-time is 6:30pm CST on ABC
. Horns Down.
