Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's afternoon; I was speaking metaphorically. In "The Godfather," Vito Corleone receives many requests for assistance on the day of his daughter's wedding, because it is said that no Sicilian can decline a request made of him on his daughter's wedding day. That seems like a tradition subject to rampant abuse, so I would never go quite that far, but I will say I am seldom in a better mood than I am the day after the Georgia Bulldogs convincingly beat the Auburn Tigers on the gridiron, so this seems a most opportune time to raise these questions.

Just prior to the start of college football season, we made some major upgrades to the site, adding regular contributors to the masthead and, I believe, dramatically improving both the quantity and the quality of the content appearing here on a daily basis. This is your chance to provide frank feedback, secure in the understanding that I'm going to be as open-minded as I'll ever be, because, hey, we beat Auburn like they stole something (you should excuse the expression).

What are we doing well here at Dawg Sports? Where do we need to improve? What are we overdoing, where are we underperforming, what do we need to keep doing, and what do we need to change? Let us know in the comments below.

Go 'Dawgs!

Well, it's only been eight months since my original lexicon post, and since I promised to update it "in a timely manner," I am only too pleased to deliver the latest revised product on the exact timeline I promised!*

As is always going to be the case with a heavily-visited website with a significant "regular" user base, there are certain colloquialisms that have sprung up around here.  We don't wish any newcomers to be intimidated or confused by the use of these idioms, however, so this guide is provided as a primer to help you understand just exactly what the heck we're talking about, and what exactly that inside joke means. (Well, most of the time, at least.)

The newly-revised lexicon is below, presented in more-or-less random order... please feel free to comment and/or suggest additions!

* - Yes, eight months counts as "in a timely manner."  That's barely a blink of an eye on a geologic time scale!  Hey, at least I got it done before the season started.  :-)

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(Author’s Note: The impact of technology upon sports fandom is self-evident; the mere fact that you currently are using tools that essentially did not exist 20 years ago to participate in a medium that essentially did not exist ten years ago is proof enough of that. This is the third and final installment in a series of postings sponsored by Samsung Enhanced Content at various SB Nation weblogs addressing the transformative influence of technology upon the ways in which we enjoy competitive athletics. The previous installments are available here and here; MaconDawg and I sincerely hope that those postings, and this one, cast us in at least a somewhat more favorable light than Krusty the Clown when he was shilling for Canyonero.)

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This is part two of a three part series at Dawg Sports sponsored by Samsung. Kyle explained the basis of it here, but to refresh you, Samsung challenged SB Nation bloggers to write anything they wanted about the intersection of technology and sports. This is one of many responses to that challenge. It's not precisely a "Dawgography" in the style that you've seen on this site, but it's fairly close. Enjoy. And try to keep the tractor jokes in the comments to a minimum.

We all have our own formative memories of Georgia football. Depending on when you came of age as a fan, how you were exposed to Bulldog football is just as much a part of your initiation as what you were exposed to. I was exposed to our beloved team in a time before ESPN showed 12 college football contests per week. Before sports talk radio became widespread. A time when Lou Holtz was considered a viable coaching commodity outside the state of South Carolina. It was a long, long time ago.

In my case, I remember vividly three episodes which shaped my early Bulldog fandom. Way back in the early 80's, when I was perhaps 4 years old, a televised University of Georgia football game was a family event. Herschel Walker-led Georgia was a compelling TV draw in the days before ESPNU, ESPN2, ESPN3 and, for those of us back in the sticks, ESPN or any other cable provider. I well remember my father hunched in front of the television at my grandmother's house focused on a Bulldog team fighting an opponent I frankly don't even remember. Could have been Ole Miss, but I'm not really sure and don't know that it matters. I do remember rather clearly my father jumping up and down yelling "Go Herschel! Go!" as the big back from Wrightsville broke loose at the line. I didn't know what exactly had occurred, but my father was very, very excited about it, and I recall thinking that must make whatever this thing was pretty important.

This of course had been preceded by repeated checking of the television antenna to get the best possible reception. I imagine we would have recorded the game on our Video Cassette Recorder, or "VCR" (insert old dude quotes) if we had one. Which we did not. As a result I really have no strong first person memories of Herschel Walker's rampage across the SEC. I was too young to personally appreciate what I was seeing on the screen. I was able to tell the good guys from the bad based on uniform color, but that was about it.* I was yet to understand the elegance of a well-executed play action pass, which was probably all well and good since Vince Dooley had little use for them anyway.

I think back now on how that early indoctrination would have gone in 2010. Now my dad could use his digital video recorder, or "DVR" (insert young dude quotes) to record the game and watch it with me whenever it was convenient. Over and over again. He could show me youtube clips of Herschel's greatest runs. We could throw things at the television screen in tandem as Mark May blathered on about how Georgia's tailback was overrated (you know he would and don't you dare argue about it).

A second indelible memory revolves around a late summer evening perhaps two years later. Some media group (perhaps WSB) had put together a season preview of the Georgia Bulldog football team which was set to air on a Sunday evening (probably after 60 Minutes, which I assumed at the time every human being on the planet must watch because, hey, there was nothing else on in our neck of the woods besides Marty Stouffer's Wild America). I had by this time attained some rudimentary understanding of the game of football, and was really looking forward to seeing my heros on TV.

Being a 6-7 year old boy in that day and time, I spent the afternoon roaming around outside doing the things boys who grow up out in the country do: catching frogs, finding interesting rocks, throwing said rocks at things (and by "things" I probably mean "rabbits" and "squirrels", but let's not dwell on that, ok?). Bottomline, I managed to lose track of time and miss the UGA football season preview. I was crestfallen. Actually I don't know if kids of that age are capable of "crestfallen". Inconsolable might be more accurate. My nacent fandom was dealt a blow by a crippling lack of technology. I'm sure the interview with Keith Henderson would have changed my life. But it was all for naught. Sadly that was about it for football until the actual games began. It all seems so comical now that I have the 2010 iteration of this type of program, which aired on Fox Sports South, safely tucked away on my DVR. It came on one August night while I was doing something else really important like loading the dishwasher or checking my email.

Finally, I remember my first game in Sanford Stadium. Perhaps prompted by my disconsolate state after missing the 1986 season preview show, I was allowed to attend the 1987 Georgia/LSU game, which coincided with my grandfather being honored by the University for his contributions to agriculture in Georgia through the Cooperative Extension Service. At the time I don't think I realized that I had a ticket for a highly anticipated matchup of top 20 SEC teams. I was just really excited when my dad pointed out Rodney Hampton and Lars Tate to me. Georgia trailed at halftime, took the lead late, and finally surrendered it again on a Tommy Hodson touchdown pass with 5 minutes to go. I'm told that this game was broadcast on ESPN (again, no cable, and no idea at the time what that was) and that some former coach named Lee Corso was on the broadcast team.

I'm also told that in the movie Cocktail this game plays on a background television during one bar scene. I have yet to get my royalty check, and IMDB rejected it for inclusion in my film biography. Whatever. It would have been a heckuva debut. My most prominent nonfootball related memory of that trip was listening to the radio in the back of my grandmother's car (a gray monte carlo, if I recall correctly) on the way to Athens. R.E.M.'s The One I Love had recently been released as a single and played on the radio at least 5 times during that 2 hour drive. It didn't matter what station you tuned to. The song was everywhere, in a way that I'm not sure any music can be in this day and time. There are just too many channels/feeds/streams for anything to become truly ubiquitous anymore.

I remember being told that the guys who did that song (which, to a 9 year old's keen ears wasn't all that special) were from Athens, where we were going. I was intrigued. It's interesting to me now that MTV was instrumental in launching the career of 4 guys based in Athens, Georgia, of all places. In another day and time they might have toiled in obscurity unless they'd chosen to move to New York or L.A. or some other locale where lounge lizard music industry folk could have seen them firsthand, doing something like this:

Obviously, such was not necessary, and America's best college town was all the better for their native sons' insistence on that most southern of cultural stratagems, staying put right where you're dropped.

Technology has that kind of leveling effect, even in sports. It's amusing to consider Boise State as sort of an R.E.M. of the college football world, doing things very differently in a place off the beaten path and out of sight of national tastemakers. Now, five years after crashing and burning in savage fashion in Sanford Stadium (for two years afterwards when something confused me I told people I had been "Zabranskied") Boise State is a perennial top 10 team.

Not coincidentally, twenty-three years after I first heard them, R.E.M. still makes some of the best music available for aural consumption. L.S.U. still wins SEC football games in stultifying fashion, though without Mike Archer on the sidelines. And my Dad still yells at the television during Georgia games.

I guess my gameday experience is much the same as it was back in the low-fi days. Now it's just delivered in HD. Feel free to share your memories of Georgia football in the pre-College Gameday era in the comments. Until later . .

Go 'Dawgs!!!

* As an aside I also learned my colors based on the paint jobs employed by different tractor manufacturers. I initially did not refer to green as such, rather calling it "John Deere". Red was "International." Blue was "Ford." I like to think this was evidence of intellectual precociousness. Draw your own conclusions.

(Author’s Note: Sometimes, a confluence of circumstances coalesces in such a way that it is hard to take it as anything other than a sign. It has been a busy week, both at work and on the weblog; we have been discussing what we as fans might do to boost the mojo of the Georgia Bulldogs as they head into their critical SEC East showdown with the Florida Gators; I have been wondering how I would be able to get everything done that needed doing; I have been looking for ways to shake it up again in Too Much Information; and, as attested to by the prominent Samsung Enhanced Content advertising apparent on SB Nation weblogs, the ongoing effort to take fan-produced sports content from cottage industry to viable enterprise sometimes involves finding creative ways to combine commercial opportunities with partisan exhortations in what Jack Donaghy would call "synergy." After all of these data had rattled around in my head for a while, it hit me how to juggle everything I had up in the air without dropping any of the metaphorical balls or coming across like Krusty the Clown trying to convince you to buy a Canyonero. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you this week’s special World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party edition of Too Much Information.)

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