Friday Dawg Bites is Digging Into The Leftovers and Chuckling at the Irony

Good morning y’all. I hope your Thanksgiving was a fantastic one and that your spread was both epic and delicious. More importantly than what was eaten, I hope that you enjoyed your company… Even if that was just yourself.

Yesterday being a holiday, there isn’t a ton to report in the way of Bulldog news, but there’s a few things of note worth looking at…

The UGA Football social media team has been killing it all year, but of all the game trailers they’ve put out this season this week’s made us smile the most. It is narrated by Brian Snitker, manager of your World Champion Atlanta Braves. I will take clips of current and former Dawgs killing Georgia Tech spliced with footage of the Braves clinching their title everyday of my life moving forward thank you very much.

There’s also a good chuckle to be had here. The first clip is the upper deck of Bobby Dodd Stadium full of red and black Dawg fans, which we always love to see. When you add in the fact that the Atlanta Braves play 15 minutes from Georgia Tech’s campus and they’ve sent their mascot, manager, and a key player to UGA home games since winning the title you have to laugh. To make matters worse for the Yellow Jackets, Geoff Collins has done everything short of getting an OutKast album tattooed on his neck to try and tie his program’s identity to Atlanta. Now the head coach of the city’s first champion in 26 years is narrating UGA’s pregame hype video versus the team from Atlanta. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the dynamics in this rivalry… *chef’s kiss*

A game away from the end of his third season on The Flats, Geoff Collins has a record of 9-24. His .274 winning percentage is the worst by any coach in Tech history, and when Georgia puts the 2021 Yellow Jackets out of their misery on Saturday it will clinch Collins third straight three-win season. It’d be fair to say that things aren’t going great, and this week Collins got the dreaded vote of confidence from Athletic Director Todd Stansbury.

I believe Stansbury when he says Collins will be back for a fourth year. Tech would be insane to enter the coaching market with the amount of high profile jobs that are open right now. Collins also was signed to a seven-year contract when he took the job. His salary is only $3.3 million a year, but he would get 100% of the remaining value if fired within the first 4 years. Jimmy Sexton remains undefeated. After next season that buyout goes down a good bit, but it’s hard to imagine anyone coming into the Georgia Tech job and competing with Kirby Smart for recruits in the foreseeable future. The gap between these programs has never been wider.

Speaking of that gap, it feels pertinent to mention that the largest ever margin of victory in this game was a 48-0 Tech win during WWII. That margin could be in play on Saturday depending on how much work Kirby Smart wants his first and second stringers to get in before returning to Atlanta next week.

UGA will have better players at every position on Saturday, but if you want a little pregame primer on what to expect from Monken and Lanning, Dawg_Stats and I covered the personnel matchups that UGA should exploit on DawgSportsLive on Thanksgiving Eve.

Before we go, I want to take my turn thanking all of you wonderful readers and commenters for giving all of us a place to make content. There are lots of places on the internet to find thoughts on your team, but you guys engage and promote our work with a loyalty that never ceases to amaze me. There’s a lot of places where fans yell at each other and spew constant negativity, but this place remains a place for civil and intelligent discourse even when the Dawgs aren’t 11-0. If the rest of the internet was like this place then we might live in something nearing Utopia.

I am grateful to macondawg for another year of letting me write here, and for all the other contributors who consistently make me laugh and think. I am also grateful for this team and the way they play the game. I said it last week, but it bears repeating… These Bulldogs play the game the way I think a lot of diehard fans would if they happened to have freakish athletic ability. They get it, and they want to deliver a championship for UGA and the state of Georgia. Time will tell if they will or not, but I will always remember how special this group is and was.

Kirby Smart continues to recruit at absurd levels. That being said, we might not see a defensive front seven like this in college football for another generation. In the midst of worrying about what this team isn’t perfect at, take the time to appreciate all of the ways they are. Come 3:30 on Saturday the University of Georgia will be 12-0 for the first time since 1980. I grew up with Goff and Donnan, and for a large portion of my life I was convinced I would never see something like this. Appreciate the achievement that will happen in front of us tomorrow before moving towards worrying about Alabama and the CFP…

All that’s left to do now is watch two straight days of wall-to-wall football. The main attractions are on Saturday, but there’s some sneaky good games to be enjoyed this afternoon and evening. I intend to enjoy it before it goes away for the Winer. Pop open the mayo, lather it onto a couple slices of white bread with some leftover turkey, add a few Bread & Butter Pickles, and enjoy yourselves. Cheers, y’all.

GO DAWGS!