My excitement level was running into overdrive. It was early September, 1988, and I’d just turned 16. Confidence was high in my beloved Georgia Bulldogs, and the nationally televised season opener against Tennessee was all I could think about. My grades those first couple of weeks as a sophomore at Statesboro High School likely reflected such.
Gameday finally arrived. So that Saturday morning, I piled in the car with my good friends Bob and Jay Deal, and we pulled out of Statesboro early Saturday morning and headed to Athens.
This was going to be the year that Georgia broke through, so close the previous few, but for a handful of gut-wrenching losses, and won the SEC championship for the first time since 1982.
It was the first game between the Bulldogs and Volunteers since the 1981 season opener, when reigning national champion Georgia, in all its red and black glory, delivered a dominant 44-0 victory Between the Hedges.
Tailback U was in overdrive with Rodney Hampton and Tim Worley (how about speedy walk-on Kevin Brown), plus Keith Henderson and Alphonso Ellis at fullback.
The game was a back and forth affair, but that powerful Vince Dooley rushing attack took over and the Bulldogs pulled it out 28-17. Hampton ran for 196 yards, Worley 144, and they both scored two touchdowns. Hampton went toss sweep right towards the bridge and the West End Zone on fourth and goal from the three with the Bulldogs leading 21-17, and scored. Sanford Stadium was delirious. The rains came, and it rained harder and harder. We would hear the mighty Larry Munson on the highlights afterwards, “The Rain is pouring down in sheets!” The great man was just fantastic.
Walking up from our seats on the south side, joyously soaked and 16, screaming “How Bout Them Dawgs,” I confidently proclaimed, “We’re doing it this year, we’re winning the SEC and going to the Sugar Bowl.”
Georgia would not beat Tennessee again until the next century. 12 years later. 2000. I had gone from 16 to 28. The 1990s against the Volunteers was pure misery. Tennessee won the rematch in 1989. Then, the league expanded and split into divisions in 1992, the Bulldogs and Volunteers began playing every season. In 1992, Georgia, which had the better team with Eric Zeier, Garrison Hearst, Randall Godfrey, Bernard Williams, Shannon Mitchell, Terrell Davis and Andre Hastings, lost 34-31. Six bleeping turnovers. Crushing. It was the second of nine straight losses to Tennessee, a streak that ran through 1999. That nine game losing streak is the longest by the Bulldogs to any foe, one more than the infamous drought against the enemy from 1949-1956.
When Dooley’s Dogs beat Tennessee that night in 1988, Georgia led the all-time series with the Volunteers 10-8-2. The two just didn’t play much back then. After Tennessee’s nine straight, the Volunteers led the series 17-10-2.
Coach Jim Donnan’s Dogs defeated the Volunteers 21-10 in 2000, a 99-yard drive and Tim Wansley’s interception: the punctuation. The Georgia students stormed the field and for the first —and only time— the goalposts came down in Sanford Stadium.
It was a new century, and the series was about to turn.
Mark Richt took over in 2001, and there was the Hobnail Boot: David Greene to Verron Haynes (after some big plays from Randy McMichael and Damien Gary). Georgia won four straight. And even won three straight in Knoxville in 2001, 2003 and 2005, something that only Alabama with Bear Bryant and Gene Stallings had done up to that point.
The Vols won four of six from 2004-2009 though. But a new decade of the 2010s turned things back the Bulldogs way. In Richt’s last season 2015, Georgia blew a 24-3 lead and lost in Knoxville. In Kirby Smart’s first year 2016, the Bulldogs got beat on the Josh Dobbs Hail Mary. Those have been the only two losses for Georgia to Tennessee since 2010, a 12-2 advantage for the Bulldogs including seven in a row here in Smart’s reign, with all of the wins coming by at least 14 points.
Georgia now leads the series 28-23-2.
That 28 is a big number heading into this showdown.
Georgia is riding a school-record 28-game winning streak on Dooley Field at Sanford Stadium, the longest active home victory stretch in the country.
As part of that seven-game winning streak against Tennessee, and now eight in a row over Auburn and seven of the last eight against Florida with this year’s victories, the Bulldogs are 28-2 since the Kirby Dynasty began in 2017 against the Yellow Jackets, Gators, Volunteers and Auburn. Another quick note, with Georgia having already beaten Florida and Auburn, the Bulldogs beat the Gators and Tigers in 1982 en route to an 11-0 regular season and third straight SEC title. Georgia didn’t beat Florida and Auburn in the same season again until 2007. The Bulldogs did it again in 2011 and 2012. Smart’s Dogs have now beaten Florida and Auburn in the same season four straight years, and six of the last seven. If you want to throw in the vengeance SEC Championship Game victory over Auburn in 2017, after the Tigers beat the Bulldogs On the Plains in the regular season meeting, that’s how numbers can be favorably utilized.
Of course mighty challenges remain with Tennessee and then the Jackets —with UMass sandwiched in between, as Georgia tries to extend those streaks and records and fight into the College Football Playoff.
But heading in, thinking back to losing nine in a row to Tennessee, it would have been hard to imagine as the 1990s came to a close, that a quarter century later, the Bulldogs would be eyeing eight straight in this battle of tradition-rich, royal SEC programs.