The SECCG would have been a very different affair under Spurrier’s divisional record proposal.
Spurrier’s proposal to go by division record would have changed seven of the 20 SEC Championship Game matchups to date, assuming the SEC had continued to use head-to-head as the first tiebreaker.
Those first two Alabama-Florida games in Birmingham would have been Alabama-Tennessee in 1992 and LSU-Florida in 1993 instead. LSU would have reached the championship game in ’93 with a 3-5 SEC record, in part because undefeated Auburn was ineligible for the postseason.
Georgia, which finished 13-1 in 2002, wouldn’t have won the SEC championship that year because it wouldn’t have reached Atlanta despite finishing a game ahead of the Gators in overall SEC record. Ron Zook’s first team, which finished 8-5, would have gone to Atlanta by virtue of going 5-0 against the East.
There has never been an LSU-Florida SEC Championship Game. If Spurrier’s proposal had been in place all these years, there would have been four, in 1993, 1995, 2006 and 2007. Tim Tebow would have played in the SEC Championship Game his entire career instead of missing one in 2007 when Florida was 5-3 in the SEC, a game behind Tennessee and Georgia. [Emphasis added.]
That’s just wrong.
Get The Picture 
What do you have against Curly Hallman?
Muscle Shoals HS would be able to brag that they fired a coach that had gone to the SECCG!
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Underneath Spurrier’s bullshit is actually a nugget of wisdom for Georgia: take care of business in the East. I’ll need a fact check, but including 2011 Florida has lost around 13-15 games to East opponents going back to 1991. Meanwhile, we’ve NEVER gone undefeated against East teams. If you want the long and short of why Florida went to the Dome so many times, which led to SEC and National Championship chances and why Georgia often comes up just short, look no further than our record against East teams. An East loss cost us national title shots in 02 and 07. After USC upset us at home in 07 Spurrier ridiculed that we weren’t really that impressive of a team since we’d at the time lost the last 5 games to Eastern division opponents. If Georgia wants to take the next step as a program, the biggest favor they can do themselves is to start with the games closest to home.
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+1. Particularly Florida and to a slightly lesser extent UT and USCe. Some of those years we could have quite possibly won the BCSNC. Beat the other SEC East teams!!!
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I also forgot to mention that since the head to head is the tiebreaker, an East loss is twice as damaging to our chances of going to the SECCG as a loss to a West team. Again, why it’s so important to beat the East teams.
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Yeah, but if he pulls another ST play that we can’t decipher before there are 6 pts on the board, he can possibly thumb his devious nose at us again.
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All this time we have been misspelling “genus” as “genius”.
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Haven’t we had enough “change” in the SEC this year and (potential/threatened) destruction of tradition (and no, I don’t mean South Carolina not getting us the second week of the season…)? People really need to get some perspective, chill out, and not be reflexively self-serving…. If we made the switch and we were to go 6-0 against the East next year but lose to Auburn and Ole Miss, while Carolina’s only loss was to us, we’d be the East champs, and Spurrier would be bitching about how he had the team wiht the fewer losses, etc. Over time, things have a way of evening out, but constantly tinkering with things to prevent “last year’s travesty from happening” is a sure-fire way to make sure no one is ever happy.
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Awe, the schedule isn’t fair. This from a guy that mandated his team take every week off before the annual UGA game.
We already don’t consider losses out of conference, and now we should stop considering losses out of division. Why consider losses at all? Maybe we should just pick the seccg contenders by picking the coaches with the biggest mouths.
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Questions WCD: (1) If the SEC sets the SEC schedule, not the ADs of the various schools, how was it that SOS said in advance to Florida alums that he was going to arrange things so that UF got the week off before the WLOCP every year and did so for about 20 years? (2) Why were we so late to recognize this and move to counter it?
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Spurrier never said that.
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Mike, I personally saw a VIDEO of him saying that. He also said playing Georgia in a building in Jacksonville called the “Gator Bowl” was a big advantage, too. That same video contained his comments about what if Florida was playing Georgia in the State Georgia at a place called the “Bulldog Bowl” and wouldn’t that be an advantage for Georgia? He was responding to UF alums in about 1990 who wanted to move the game out of JAX and concluded with “Why don’t you give me a couple of cracks at ’em first?”
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He never insisted on getting a week off before the game that I am aware. I was a pretty big Spurrier quote follower so forgive me if I say I need some kind of link. That said, we used to play UGA and Auburn in back to back weeks and he was adamant about getting that changed.
In any case, I do agree that he also changed the whole Gator psychology about the game, by referencing the name of the place and the fact that it was played in Florida.
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SOS did get that changed. He got an off week inserted between the Florida-Auburn game and the Florida-Georgia game starting in about 1993. That’s exactly what I said above.
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We also caused our part in that by wanting the week off after UF, rather than going UF, then Auburn without a break.
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That and we had Ray Goff as head coach for SOS’s first 5 years at Flarduh.
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Spurrier ir right that other than Miss and Ark we played the same schedule as USzc. What he omits is that we had to beat UM while it did not matter if USC lost to Ark. When we best UM and SC lost to Ark both teams played the same group: Auburn, UT, UF, UK, and Vandy. Since USC had the head to head tiebreaker and just had to match our wins. Ergo, the fact that Arkansas was tougher than UM did not cause SC to come in second.
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quit trying to cloud the issue with facts, Judge. You might as well try to explain algebra to chihuahua as expect a Chikin devotee to be able to understand that concise, simple and factual logic.
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None of that would have happened, though, because the Spurrier Doctrine on Divisional Championships only takes effect in years where it will benefit Coach Spurrier’s teams.
Seriously, whiny, bitchy South Carolina fans: everyone knew the rules when the season started. When Georgia fumbled away the game to South Carolina in Game 2, the Bulldogs knew they were behind the 8 ball and would have to be nearly perfect the rest of the way, and they were. They also knew South Carolina would have to lose two SEC games, which they did. You lost to one of the worst teams produced by Auburn University in 20 years. You couldn’t beat the same Auburn University team that Georgia, Alabama, and LSU all took to a ritual slaughter behind the woodshed. And you also lost to an Arkansas team that ‘Bama and LSU both handled fairly easily, lest we start talking about how SC could have won a championship if they’d only gotten there. Both Alabama and LSU were light years ahead of South Carolina, and Georgia, too. But had you just beaten poor, pitiful Auburn, you would have been there. You didn’t. Oh well.
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Scene: FU Statuary Works(overheard) :
“On the Spurrier model; – make the head narrower and carve larger balls.”
“Chuckle”, ” OK, who’s the wise guy who carved buttocks on the shoulder of the backup model for casting? It makes Spurrier’s nose look like his penis.”
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