Why the Future of Georgia Football Depends Upon Keeping the Florida Game in Jacksonville

. . . how one team can have home field advantage when both teams get an equal allotment of tickets.

If 50 per cent of the fans in the stands are ours, it’s utterly irrelevant how far we are from each school’s campus.

If we get 50 per cent of the tickets and more than 50 per cent of the fans in the stands are rooting for the Gators, or if their 50 per cent is louder than our 50 per cent, the problem isn’t the venue, the problem is us. It won’t matter if we play them at Mark Richt’s family reunion if we Georgia fans can’t match the intensity of our counterparts in Gainesville. Don’t make Jacksonville the scapegoat for our failings as a fan base.

By the way, if the Florida football program of the past isn’t coming back (which seems odd, since every other team in the country seems to enjoy success in a cyclical fashion, and since Ron Zook seemed rather handily to take the Saurians back to their pre-Spurrier status, and since such other perennial powers located in Sunshine State recruiting hotbeds as Florida State and Miami have managed to go back to mediocrity), what makes us think going home and home will make any difference? The last time the Gators played in Athens, the final score was 52-17. That home field advantage sure made a hell of a lot of difference, didn’t it?

. . . for which I apologize. I get that the home field advantage you’re talking about is ours between the hedges, not their (supposed) home field advantage by the St. John’s River. I regret the confusion likely caused by my having arranged my points in the less logical order.

One other note on Georgia’s home field advantage bears making, though: Mark Richt is 42-9 in Sanford Stadium and 30-4 on opponents’ home fields. That gives him an .824 winning percentage at home and an .882 winning percentage on the road.

If we don’t want to play the Gators in Jacksonville any longer, facing them in Athens or Atlanta isn’t the way to go; we should move the game permanently to Gainesville. If Mark Richt’s home, road, and neutral site records over the last eight years are indicative of anything, the problem isn’t that we’re playing the Saurians too close to The Swamp, it’s that we’re playing them 70 miles too far away from it.

Evidence of a Georgia home field advantage over Florida in Athens is nonexistent after 1932. Maybe the Great Depression is coming back, but the football conditions existing in that era are far less likely to recur than a throwback to the ‘80s. Heck, having been in the stands for last year’s Alabama and Georgia Tech games, I’m not prepared to wager on our home field advantage over any decent team, much less against one that’s won two national championships in the last three years, has won 16 of its last 19 games against the ’Dawgs, and beat both Alabama and the team that beat Georgia Tech in the Chick-fil-A Bowl last year.

Count me among those who don’t believe playing the game in Jacksonville has an appreciable effect on whether we win or lose the game. (And, apparently, count me among those who use the first person plural when referring to UGA athletics.) I do not believe it was some magical combination of a Florida location and Steve Spurrier as a coach that suddenly made the series swing so strongly in the Gators’ favor. I think it was an unfortunate combination of, inter alia, Steve Spurrier as a coach and Ray Goff as a coach. Yes, Richt has a losing record, but that’s a pretty small sample. In any event, of all possible factors, I think the game’s location is the least significant — negligible at most, even.

And in case it wasn’t clear, count me among those who want to leave the game in Jax.

. . . L.S.U. is the only major Division I-A program in its state.

With the exception of a few nationally-recruited players from the Pelican State (many of whom are as likely to go to Michigan as to Alabama), there is not the same “addition by subtraction” element to the Bayou Bengals’ recruiting. If Louisiana State loses out to Texas on a recruit from New Orleans, that’s a guy they’ll likely never see again. If Georgia loses out on recruits from South Georgia and North Florida, there’s a good chance those guys are going to Florida. Think of all the kids out of Atlanta we lost to Tennessee in the 1990s.

We need to be able to recruit South Georgia and North Florida effectively to win consistently. Playing one game a year in Jacksonville helps us do that.

Why do you think Mark Richt objects to Alabama and Clemson playing in the Georgia Dome? He knows such a game allows the Crimson Tide and the Tigers to make inroads in the Atlanta area. Giving up our historic beachhead in Jacksonville would be an unbelievably short-sighted gesture of surrender. However bad things are between Georgia and Florida now, our departure would concede that territory to an enemy with whom we already are struggling. Claiming that leaving Jacksonville would make us better able to beat the Gators makes approximately as much sense as claiming that withdrawing from Guantanamo Bay would make us better able to effectuate change in Cuba. It’s nonsensical to the point of absurdity.

I have a question for you, Hobnail_Boot, which is intended not to be accusatory, but merely to obtain information. I disagree with UgaMatt, but at least I know where he’s from, so I’m able to assess how well informed his opinion is where the South Georgia fan base is concerned. Where did you grow up? Where does your family live?

Once again, I’m not saying that to point fingers; you may well have ties to South Georgia of which I am unaware, and, even if you don’t, you’re entitled to your opinion as a loyal denizen of Bulldog Nation. I’m just a big believer in transparency in the blogosphere—-hence, my use of my real name—-and I believe it is useful in assessing arguments against Jacksonville to know something about the critic’s background.

This may not apply to you, but, in my experience, most of the Georgia fans I know who want to move the game from Jacksonville have no ties to South Georgia, have never been to a game there, and are not old enough to remember how dominant we have been there (Georgia is 40-36-1 against Florida in the Gateway City). In other words, most opponents of Jacksonville arrive at their opposition from a position of relative ignorance. That may not be you, but it’s worthwhile to know how much knowledge a fan possesses when assessing whether to place stock in his position.

. . . upon what do you base your claim that later start times for the World Series are a minor factor in the decline in interest in major league baseball?

I ask that only because I think it’s fairly well established, at least anecdotally, that the inability of a generation of American boys to see championship baseball played has been a huge factor in the waning interest in the sport.

At a minimum, it has enough common-sense appeal to lead me to believe it in the absence of some compelling reason to believe otherwise. If you know some substantive reason why that widespread belief is wrong, I’d be obliged to you if you shared it with me.