Drop Tech is Georgia football silliness

Georgia football fans contemplate dropping Tech from the football schedule. Really?

With Georgia football expecting to host the nation’s largest spring game audience and an equally impressive group of recruits Saturday for G-Day, much of the Bulldog Nation has moved on to the Silly Season.

The Silly Season: that mystical time between May 1 and August 1 when the light of reason fails to penetrate the Bulldog Country atmosphere. The first episode is another remake of that Bulldog Twilight Zone cult classic, “Drop Tech Play Clemson.”

Not running this state

Put aside the whole “college football is all about rivalries” argument and go straight to the most painful fact – Georgia doesn’t run this state, not in football. Baseball – yes. Basketball – definitely. Football – there’s work to do, Dawg people.

The Bulldogs are 3 – 2 against the Jackets the last five years. One funny bounce, one stray official call, a couple of key injuries and Georgia football, and its King – head coach Kirby Smart – are simply a .500 team against not just a middle of the road ACC program, but the most hated of all Georgia rivals.

The biggest reason to play Tech is to beat ‘em. The Dawgs haven’t done that enough.

Unfinished business

Putting aside the metaphysical question of, “Can one beat Tech enough?” there is far more serious unfinished business.

From 1949 to 1956 Georgia Tech beat Georgia eight straight. The Bulldogs call it The Drought, and it is the darkest period in Georgia athletic history. The Drought ended when Theron Sapp crashed through the Tech line for the first Bulldog touchdown against the Jackets in four seasons and the lone score in 1957.

Sapp, The Man who Broke the Drought, has his jersey retired next to three of the greatest players to ever play a college football game – Frank Sinkwich, Charlie Trippi, and Herschel Walker.

Any Bulldog that wants to drop the Tech game before beating Tech eight – or nine (ten, eleven) straight –  is relinquishing citizenship in the Bulldog Nation. And even if you’re somehow OK with letting the Jackets live on with The Drought un-avenged, dropping Tech means tossing away future championships.

Atlanta provides the lifeblood

The Tech campus lies in the heart of the greatest recruiting territory north of Miami. A biennial trip to pound the Jackets  in Atlanta claims the fertile Atlanta recruiting fields as Georgia’s, and Georgia’s alone, home territory. Give that up, and every school in the Southeast can claim, “We own Atlanta.”

The short shortsightedness of refusing the opportunity to play in Atlanta against an arch-rival and everything that comes with it and everything it means is beyond lunacy. It is idiocy.

And even if Georgia can argue its supremacy, ignore The Drought, and overcome the recruiting disadvantage, dropping Tech gives the Jackets one more win every season. A 6 – 6 record becomes 7-5 and a bowl season. A 7-5 bowl season becomes an 8 – 4 top 25 season. An 8 – 4 record becomes a 9 – 3 top-tier Bowl season.

And, God forbid, can any Bulldog live through watching Tech play Nichols State on the Saturday after Thanksgiving with an 11 – 0 record?

Let’s quit being silly, Dawg people. Georgia could stop breathing more easily than stop playing Tech.