Cheap Seats View of a Georgia Football Rocky Top Heartbreak
Knoxville became heart break city on many levels for the Georgia football team Saturday.
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Our season slipped through the SEC East standings like the ball going through Reggie Davis‘ hands on 3rd and 9. Whatever disease Tennessee has to give up big leads, we caught it in Knoxville.
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For this game, I met some friends I knew through a dating service at a local watering hole. Don’t judge – it’s tough for us 37-year-old sports fanatics. And sadly, the women I met at these dinners were better football watching buddies than the guys. My rule: if you can’t tell me your team’s two-deep, you don’t get a second date. I set the ground rules early.
Pregame – I stuck to the theme of being cheap – not spending money on tickets, traveling up to Knoxville and had whatever was cheap and on tap.
As for the game, I did not know that we finally tied the series up last year, 21-21-2. First play from the line of scrimmage set the tone for the game when Nick Chubb went down for the game, but hopefully not his career. It was fitting that Keith Marshall had to step up at the stadium where he was injured two years ago. But, he couldn’t get it done, and we had to turn to the passing game, yet again. For the second week in a row, did we abandon the run game too early?
The first quarter wasn’t even six minutes in, and UGA has yet to get a first down after three straight 3-and-outs. I don’t know if it was so much of a defensive showdown at this point as offensive ineptitude, and that goes for both teams
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Sony Michel was hitting a brick wall going up the middle until we tried a screen pass for a first down, and that opened up some holes for our OL and Michel up the middle.
In the first quarter, it looked like we were tackling air. After Leonard Floyd‘s momentum changing scoop and score, it looked like we were finally wrapping up tackles, until we let Tennessee back into the game before halftime. We went from 24-3 to 24-17 at halftime.
The errant tackling returned in the second half, most noticeably, Malkolm Parrish’s missed tackles on Tennessee’s first TD of the second half. Blame it on the youth, coaching, but our secondary had some noticeable holes, and teams will continue to attack the air the rest of the season after seeing how Alabama and now Tennessee have dissected them.
And now our offense is in even more turmoil as we no longer have Nick Chubb to rely on. What is our offensive identity?
I call myself a glass half-full optimist. Internally, I’m chastising myself for believing that we were better than we were. On the outside, I kept my mouth shut with every dropped pass and missed tackle. I was being consoled by Cincinnati fans, where Butch Jones used to coach. They don’t like him much, but I told them they had a class guy in Tuberville now.
Even with the collapse, I wished I were at Neyland with my fellow Dawg fans. Maybe they needed an extra shoulder to cry on.