A banner day in Georgia sports history

While you're busy tracking which college football coach is landing a helicopter on which high school recruit's practice field in preparation for National Signing Day, I hope you'll join me in remembering this red letter day in the history of University of Georgia, and state of Georgia, athletics. For it was on January 30, 1892, that a team from the University of Georgia took the field on North Campus against a similarly cobbled together group visiting from Mercer College (now University).

Professor Charles Herty's boys won that one 50-0, in what was the first intercollegiate football game ever played in the Peach State. Some three weeks later Herty's squad (not yet known as the "Bulldogs") would play another game at Atlanta's Piedmont Park against a group from the Alabama Polytechnic Institute located in Auburn, what would become the first game of the South's oldest intercollegiate rivalry. And the rest, as they say, is history.

*Incidentally and apropos of nothing, you may have heard that Mercer reinstituted their football programing 2013 following a 72 year hiatus. You may not know that the Bears have games lined up in the near future against Georgia Tech, Auburn, and Alabama. Which is to say they're playing a harder schedule three years in than Art Briles and Baylor ever will, and that's hilarious.