Hype is a curious creature.
Sportswriters are often guilty of applying it to games which don’t merit it. Pundits and bloggers have been known to create a narrative which so fully defines the buildup to kickoff that the postgame conversation is inevitably reshaped as a result. When that reshaping seems to ignore the facts on the ground, hype can be a harmful entity.
In other situations — think of the Super Bowl — hype isn’t necessarily unjustified, but it is omnipresent to the point of overkill. It’s not that hype wasn’t needed or welcomed; it simply stayed around too long at the party.
In many ways, the best way to regard hype before a significant football game is to acknowledge and even welcome its presence, but not obsess about its place in the larger theater of events.
This Saturday, when the Alabama Crimson Tide meet the Georgia Bulldogs, the hype which will accompany one afternoon isn’t the main reason why this clash should be seen as a major event. For all the intrigues offered by this game in the present moment, the weight of the occasion on a larger historical scale is what catapults Tide-Dawgs to a higher level of significance for everyone involved.
*
The living history of college football is breathed more deeply in the South than anywhere else in the United States. Grudges held; slights remembered; triumphs cherished; losses cursed years after they actually happened — these parts of being a sports fan, of carrying vivid memories across many decades into a new present moment, endure more in the SEC than in other college football conferences.
Because of the centrality of college football in Southern life, the ability to renew rivalries each year is a treasured thing. When those annual meetings are disrupted — as has happened for Tennessee and Alabama — it’s upsetting, both to the natural order and to the fans who have been part of the experience.
Every year, you can count on seeing Auburn play both Alabama and Georgia. Those two rivalries possess an ancient and timeless feel. They are as old as the scriptures and as bitter as the Old Testament can (at times) be. Seeing those rivalries each and every year, not merely once in a great while, sustains them at all levels and for all participants — those who play in the games, those who coach, those who broadcast the contests, and those who cheer for one side or the other.
When two fabled football schools — in the conference where college football is taken more seriously than anywhere else in our nation — aren’t able to play on a regular basis, something precious and electric is lost.
So it is with Alabama and Georgia.
*
Sure, Saturday’s game Between The Hedges matters a ton in terms of each team’s division title prospects. Tide-Dawgs is the gateway to Atlanta in early December for the winner (especially in Georgia’s case; Alabama would need Ole Miss to lose at some point). Georgia is trying to become the first SEC East winner to claim the SEC championship since Florida in 2008. Alabama is trying to win back-to-back SEC titles for the first time under Nick Saban.
However, beyond the stakes involved in 2015, Alabama and Georgia meet in the shadows of their two most recent meetings. Both of them had a lot to do with the unfolding of the past several years in SEC football, and with the way history remembers both programs.
The 2008 Alabama “Blackout Blowout” of Georgia catapulted the Tide to the top of the SEC West. Alabama was able to win its first division title since 1999, as it re-entered the national conversation. The 2012 SEC Championship Game was, on its own terms, a classic. Alabama’s ability to escape in the final seconds enabled Saban to win consecutive national championships and put his name in the select company of other coaches throughout history.
Especially in 2012, Georgia had a chance to reshape the course of the SEC, but as everyone knows, the winners rewrite history, and losers have to stand to the side. Georgia has been aching for a chance to conquer Alabama, and while 2015’s own rewards are what every UGA athlete is most centrally competing for on Saturday, a large portion of fans want to win also to diminish the bitter taste of 2008 and 2012.
“Okay, that sounds like a pretty big deal,” you might be thinking. “Maybe a lot of hype is warranted for this game.” Without obsessing out the matter… yes, it does.
Yet, if you think this game is massive, you haven’t even accounted for a deeper reason why it’s such a centerpiece event: You’re not going to see it again — not in Athens, at any rate — for a very long time.
*
You might recall that the SEC went to the trouble (emphasis on the word “trouble,” for that’s what it has created) of devising a 12-year cross-division opponent rotation. In this link here, you will notice that Alabama — after 2015 — plays Georgia only once over the next 10 seasons. The Tide will not return to Athens for a full decade.
It’s not absolutely certain, but it’s highly likely, then, that this is the last time Nick Saban and Mark Richt will coach against each other in Athens. This is almost surely the last time Saban will visit the Hedges as a head coach. It’s the last time Georgia fans will see Alabama on campus for a great many years. The upcoming Marco Rubio (or Hillary Clinton) presidency will have already ended by the time these schools meet again in Athens. (They meet in Tuscaloosa in 2020.)
As much as these teams are playing for the present moment — and what’s directly in front of them — the sadness brought about by the realization that Alabama and Georgia just won’t play very much in the future is almost overwhelming. Not having Georgia and Alabama play each other more often is a huge deficit for the sport to absorb.
Division titles, revenge, consolidating power — these are the goals of either Georgia or Alabama (or both) on Saturday afternoon. Yet, as precious as those goals are, the simpler reality that Georgia and Alabama won’t play very much over the next 10 years makes this game feel a lot larger than it already is.
It’s a weird and unsatisfying way to build up one game’s stature, but who ever said college football made sense?