My first experience with the word “buffer” came in Mrs. Futch’s Georgia History Class –which I excelled in– at William James Middle School in Statesboro. Our state, the greatest state, the state of Georgia, was a buffer colony between colonial South Carolina and the Spanish owned territory of Florida (my goodness it must have been hot there in the 1700s with no air conditioning and all the swamps and mosquitos). Basically, if Spain got frisky, and wanted to attack the English colonies, they’d have to go through Georgia before they got to the Carolinas.

Then there was the right hand man/button man for Frank Pentangeli, Willi Cicci. When the Federal Government was putting the squeeze on the Corleone family, as the compromised senator from Nevada Pat Geary slimed away from the congressional chambers, Cicci, under intense prosecution, said “buffers, yeah, there were a lot of buffers.” That’s insulation for the big boss.

Well, this is one of those buffer games. Georgia had one earlier this season. The first was against Tennessee Tech. The Golden Eagles from the Ohio Valley Conference were an overmatched foe fit in the Bulldogs schedule following the highly touted season opener with Clemson in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and the first of eight straight Southeastern Conference slugfests against Kentucky in Lexington. Now here we are on the backend of the schedule. It was Tennessee Tech between Clemson and Kentucky, now it’s the University of Massachusetts Minutemen buffered between Tennessee and the Yellow Jackets.

UMass is much more famous for basketball than football. My favorite player growing up was the incomparable No. 6 from the University of Massachusetts, Julius “Dr. J” Erving… I can still hear the great Public Address Announcer Dave Zinkoff at The Spectrum uniquely presenting the Philadelphia 76ers starting five.

My dad, incidentally, was a big Boston Celtics fan, going back to their great run with Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Red Auerbach and Tommy Heinsohn (who I despised with his blatant bias as the CBS analyst, who always had a damn green microphone flag). Meanwhile, I was pulling hard for Dr. J and the 76ers as those two old rivals squared off in several memorable Eastern Conference Playoff battles, with the Lakers awaiting the winner.

I had many magical nerf hoop dunks pretending I was Dr. J or the “Human Highlight Reel” Dominique Wilkins, throwing down a plethora of epic slam dunks.

In 1996, a young and hungry John Calipari led UMass to the Final Four. The star player was 6-11 center Marcus Camby. The Minutemen beat Kentucky in November of that season but fell to the powerful Wildcats in the national semifinal. It was Rick Pitino’s march to the national championship. Pitino, incidentally, was a point guard at UMass in the early 1970s.

UMass football enjoyed its greatest success in Division 1-AA, which has for the past couple of decades been known as FCS. In fact, in 1998, the Minutemen won the Division 1-AA National Championship, defeating Georgia Southern, coached by Paul Johnson, 55-43 in the title game.

Then, they moved up to college football’s biggest division. I always thought it was a mistake when Georgia Southern did it. Why would you give up the chance to play for national championships?

So UMass has settled into being in the lower half of the big boys, collecting checks and playing in a lot of games like this against college football’s top programs.

This is the second meeting between the Bulldogs and Minutemen. It was a “buffer” game in 2018. The Bulldogs, boasting a high octane offense, rolled to a 66-27 victory.

Georgia had beaten Auburn 27-10 the week prior to wrap up SEC play. The week after beating UMass, the Bulldogs put down the Yellow Jackets 45-21 to cap an 11-1 regular season.

That 2018 campaign was the second of three consecutive 11-1 regular season seasons. The only other time Georgia had done that was from 1980-1982. The Bulldogs went 11-0, 10-1 and 11-0, winning three straight SEC titles, highlighted by the 1980 national championship. College Football went to a 12-game regular season on a trial basis in 2002 and 2003, and then permanently went to the 12-contest slate in 2006.

Under the watch of Coach King Kirby Smart, the Bulldogs posted 12-0 regular seasons from 2021-2023. That was a first in the grand history of college football, going all the way back to Princeton vs. Rutgers in 1869. Never before in the history of the sport that so many of us love so much had any team gotten to 12-0 at any point in a season for three straight years. The Bulldogs, of course, won the 2021 and 2022 national championships. Georgia became the first school in the College Football Playoff era to capture back-to-back national titles.

In this glorious golden era for the Red and Black, this season will mark just the second time in the last eight years that Georgia hasn’t gone 11-1 or 12-0. And this year’s schedule is the toughest in the country, with the Bulldogs, sitting atop the mountain, getting the absolute best shot of every team. Astounding.

So, as we approach Thanksgiving, and what lies ahead with that game that just means so much, especially to us lifelong Bulldog fans, there is so much to be thankful for. Those precious national championships, the incredible record against the rivals, top ten finishes, major bowls and doing things that have never been done in the history of the sport, or only done by the most storied of programs and coaches.

In addition, we certainly give thanks to another Saturday, where everyone who loves Georgia can come together, in the ultimate unifier and distraction, and cheer on this school we love so passionately with so much to be proud of and thankful for.