In the McGarity vernacular, time has told us one thing.
Georgia has played a second high-major opponent four of the previous five seasons: Oklahoma State in 2009, Colorado in 2010, Boise State in 2011, and Clemson in 2013. And Georgia has lost each of those games.
“While it might have been exciting to fans, it did not yield a championship,” McGarity said. “So one could argue that in order to put yourself in the best spot, what model works best.”
Presumably that model doesn’t include holding the program accountable for losing those kinds of games. So we as a fan base can either be entertained by losses to power conference teams or bored watching beatdowns of hapless Sun Belt opponents, take our pick. Man, I’m inspired. Can I pay for my 2015 season tickets early?
Get The Picture 
The model he learned from Foley while at UF. We’ll still have all the great music up until the snap during all the directional school games
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Common thread in each of these – games away from Sanford. We hammered Boise & Oklahoma St. in Athens. Clemson hasn’t won in Athens since the 80s. Colorado was a nightmare where we didn’t take them seriously in Athens in 2006 or out in Boulder in 2010. Out of those four games, Boise in 2011 was the only game where it felt like they were really better than us.
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Great point.
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The other thing…playing an opponent like Clemson or Okie State as the first game of the season AT THEIR PLACE is nuts. No top program does that. Bama will open with a tough opponent at a neutral site now and again, but no top program goes on the road to start the season on some other team’s field. I remember a few years back when LSU made that mistake and opened with a bad Washington team in Seattle–and barely won. It’s like asking to get your ass kicked. Open the season with a cupcake–at home!
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If UGA wants to play a ranked team, do it later in the year after the O and the D have the kinks worked out.
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Well..there’s Clemson this year But largely it doesn’t happen much.
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Thank goodness we don’t do it much, ug, ’cause it seems like every time we do we get hammered and it screws the season up. Lets shoot for never doing it again. Ever.
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Maybe it’s his training at UF, or maybe his views are just evolving. After all, he did schedule the current Clemson series and he switched out a home game against a Louisville team that would go 7-6 for that neutral site match-up with Boise.
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Damon Evans scheduled the Clemson series and the only reason McGarity did the Boise game was we got paid more than we’d make at a home game and it got us out of a road game.
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He actually didn’t schedule the current Clemson series Ben. Evans put that in place.
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Whoops. Looks like josh jumped in before me.
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I realize part of this is just timing and how the schedules broke, but none of those games were in Athens either. So it really was getting the worst of both worlds.
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We wouldn’t have played for the national championship in those years even without those losses so I don’t see what the big deal is. 98% of teams aren’t going to play for the national title in a given year, so why not play some interesting games?
Oddly enough, in a year where your team actually IS good enough to play for the MNC, they’ll likely win those interesting OOC games anyway
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+100
McGarity’s wish to get Boise State onto the 2011 schedule meant a lot of work shifting schedules around, mostly “incentivized” by ESPN however. Only this year is the Ole Miss vs Boise State game that was originally scheduled for 2011 finally being played. That year, when the Broncs had a senior-laden outfit to put up against our digging-out-of-a-hole program, was really not the best year for us to have picked to see what improvement Grantham’s then-new D had made, even if it did get us out of an unattractive series with Louisville.
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We lost that Boise St game because of those godawful ugly uniforms.
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That just made it more painful.
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Total BS.
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+1000
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Absolutely. His statement is a complete non-sequitur. We didn’t fail to get a championship because we lost those OOC games. We failed to get a championship because we didn’t have very good teams those years. I think every one of those teams lost at least three games, if not four. The OOC games weren’t the problem.
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It sounds to me like, starting next year, we’re looking at 3-4 years of being force fed 3 cupcakes. I might see if Howdy Doody will let me go ahead and pay for all of those years now.
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As long as the fans going to Sanford make up for the difference in revenue by attending beatdowns of Sun Belt teams at Sanford, nothing will change.
I would like to see some real forward-thinking “thought leadership” on this. So look, maybe this is crazy, but why not decide that Georgia is going to brand itself as the real junkyard dog of cfb, and make our scheduling goal to have one of the undisputed toughest schedules every year?
I think that would give an image of power and fearlessness appealing to recruits and set the brand apart, the prospects know you’re gonna need all hands on deck to power through these tough seasons so they’re going to get to play, adds a sense of urgency to practice and conditioning, catapults the public profile of the program and extends recruiting to all these different “A” markets you now find yourself playing in, etc. It’s like joining the Marines.
The best thing it would do, after three years of playing solely tough competition, your freshmen become juniors who have seen it all and played against top competition for three years – think those teams, having run that gauntlet, would be ready to contend for a championship, especially if there are now four playoff spots open to a 1-loss team? I do.
I don’t even mean you play Michigan, Notre Dame, and Clemson every year. Just replace most of the true cupcakes with UCF, Virginia, Iowa State, Navy, etc. Maybe have one strategic cupcake in a stretch w/o a bye week.
And I think you could justify a slight ticket price / merch price hike plus add some extra tv money to offset the loss of South Dakota Directional State cupcake money, yes?
Maybe it’s too much, they’d never survive the season…maybe we wouldn’t survive the season. But it seems like a preferable, courageous alternative to all the hand-wringing and fretting…I say from my easy chair, remote in hand.
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McGarity should avoid microphones from now on because only Alleva at LSU is keeping him out of the SEC cellar of ADs. So we should screw the football fans to pursue some long shot chance that the political winds will blow us a MNC opportunity? I would rather see UGA be known as a team that plays anyone and can hold their own than to manipulate a title run by rolling over games fans stay home from because they aren’t worth the gas needed to get to Athens. As eethomas noted, only Boise 2011 had a better team, but each of those games were competitive and we simply stumbled. Great teams will win those, not run from them, but they are better for having played them, win or lose.
Count me as worried about the leadership we have brought on board, he is out of touch with the people who spend the money to put fannies in the seats. He won’t realize it until we see 15-20K empty seats for three or four home games a year; by then we will have lost forever the traditions that made Athens’ Saturdays in the fall a part of so many people’s lives. On the plus side, the lines at the restrooms, and to get lousy food at the concession stands, will be less of a problem. The over amped, electronic music should echo nicely for those who bought discounted tickets to see us roll over another cupcake.
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+1
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….did we roll over N Texas last year?
snark font
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Preach on Mac. I hear ya.
I think most media and younger fans just slant everything toward a NC and nothing else matters. For me, that ship has sailed long ago. For me, it is about rivalries and matchups. Its always a good year when we beat AU, UF, Tech and the like. For someone who enjoys each game for its historical significance and rivalry bragging rights, throwing together cupcake schedules on the off chance we make the NC final four is weak sauce. I’m worried about this current leadership too. Very unimpressive.
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Good to see you are grounded in what is important, we all want to win every championship available but we can only control the SEC currently so that is what we should focus on. I just hate to see us abandon what makes UGA, and CFB, so great every year for something that only effects programs occasionally. When, and if, we get to an 8 team playoff with a guaranteed spot for an SEC champion then all this “manipulation” BS goes away.
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I am a younger fan and couldn’t agree more with both of you. Twenty plus years ago, people weren’t clinically depressed and outraged every year because we didn’t win an MNC… CFB was viewed as entertainment, not life or death.
Perhaps more than any other sport, winning a championship in CFB takes a huge amount of luck and breaks going your way, chiefly because (until,this year) only 2 of 120 teams got into the “playoff” – that’s 1.67% of teams for you home gamers. Contrast that with even baseball, which until the last 15 years had only 4 of 28 teams – or 14% – make the playoffs (with 162 games, there is also more time for the wheat to separate from the chaff, whereas in CFB with only 11 or 12 games, it’s often very difficult to see the separation, which enflames all this controversy).
All in all, the obsession with the MNC or bust is unhealthy and reminds me of Captain Ahab…
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Are you not entertained in the arena … Spainard. Now pickup some dirt and spit. That is what is has amounted too. What was the line from the Rock…losers are for sissy…that be them lately. So much for beating the hell out of someone just for damn GP rather than a dollar or a ranking. That is fun and entertaining.
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I don’t know if it’s what you were talking about but a good one from The Rock is, “Losers always cry about doing their best, winners go home and f$&@ the prom queen.”
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The way I see it, due to conference tie-ins our bowl season has 5 possible paths:
-No bowl (scheduling doesn’t matter)
-Crappy year with bowl against elite mid-major team (scheduling doesn’t matter)
-Decent-to-solid year with a bowl against a Big 10 team (our most common scenario, scheduling has mattered but only in the sense of which Big 10 we played)
-BCS game against some POS that doesn’t belong in the BCS (3-loss FSU, WVU, Hawaii… and we sometimes lose anyway, scheduling has never mattered but potentially could)
-National Title game (never played one but every time we’ve been in contention we’ve lost out because of our SEC record, not our non-conference record)
Given every scenario we’ve ever been in during the BCS era, I’d rather play a good non-Big-10, non-conference opponent every year than pad our schedule with cupcakes and get stuck playing Nebraska or Wisconsin AGAIN at the end of the year. Maybe the new yearly Big XII game will change my opinion on that, but quite frankly I haven’t been excited about a bowl game match-up since we played VT in the Peach Bowl (though I did thoroughly enjoy the Hawaii beat-down).
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The more McGarity speaks the more clear it becomes that he is an idiot. Damn those red panties and booze in Atlanta.
I was at all those losses outside of the Clemson game last year. In Stillwater, we were playing with a brand new quarterback and the worst one in the Richt era. And by the way he had fever and need IVs throughout. Oh yeah,and we lost 4 other games to teams in our own conference to boot and the Cowboys were pretty decent.
In Colorado we had the worst team of the Richt era. We blew the game at the end and yeah, Colorado was a very bad team. So were we as 6 other losses would confirm. In 2011 Boise was the better team…period. Had they not blown an easy field goal late in the year, they would have been unbeaten and played in a BCS bowl or more. And Clemson last year was a Top Ten team and we went toe to toe with them. That game did not impact our season, other than maybe Gurley straining that hammy. Hell, it might have helped us get ready for South Carolina…at least we won for a change.
You know….part of the allure of home and home games against big name programs is the excitement of the game. That means you might just lose the game. So we have lost those games….that is the risk you take. Beating the hell out of Buffalo and Troy and Coastal Carolina and Idaho State ain’t got us to a National Championship either Greg. Damn, how stupid can someone be?
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Good post. Both you and Debby (below) have hit on the major chord, the level of excitement and adrenaline from being in the stadium for the big games. It is what built both CFB and UGA’s great traditions. One of the main things he is missing is those type games are available to me at home almost EVERY Saturday on TV. When more fans feel like me, the gig is up. That is his competition, and while he cannot measure up every week, he is voluntarily giving away other weekends. Those are precious, and they build lasting memories. Who would forget the atmosphere of Auburn 2007? LSU 2005? SC 2013? etc. Who remembers/cares about Utah State? UAB? Middle TN?
I cherry pick the big games and pay much less money for it. I will not give up seeing LSU/FU, Bama/Auburn, TN/SC, or dozens of other big matchups around the country to see UGA plow over La Monroe, or another similar matchup. I can get great seats between the 40 yard lines for around $250 each for the very best games UGA plays in Sanford. So $500 and I see the one, can’t miss, game every year at home, or in Jax. I don’t care if it doubles in price, it is still a bargain versus the costs of season tickets and with better seats.
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Or you can come over to my house to watch on my giant Hi Def TV and I’ll provide the scotch. 🙂
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Come on, you know you would rather go to Jax and get immersed in a great CFB tradition.
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I never said I didn’t like the WLOCP. Actually, I do. It just puts UGA at a disadvantage–that’s all. And not just with FU but with the entire schedule–only 3 SEC home games every other year and messing up home game opportunities with better quality OOC teams.
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But we are at no disadvantage, zero, in Jax, and the record shows that. We even make more money (which doesn’t matter to me). The only understandable objection to playing in Jax should come from the merchants in Athens who would like another windfall every other year. All other objections make no sense, including the number of home games since we make more money in Jax than we would every other year in Athens. But the give up is huge, it is an enviable tradition we would be walking away from….one that would be gone forever if we abandoned it.
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Now that the recent series in Jax is evening back out I’m with you, Macallanlover. With one exception, though: the loss of a home game is only acceptable as long the Tech game guarantees a 4th BCS opponent/rival in Athens every other year.
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I understand, and that is under the control of the AD as we know schedules for enough out to insure that. I realize the SEC is jerking everyone around now until they can make a decision (which should already have been done, imo.)
As for the series “evening out”, I don’t think a cyclical run by either should make fans demand we drop the tradition. My very first conversation with Spurrier was about this, the FU fans were adamant about dropping Jax when he arrived because they couldn’t win there. His approach was to man up and change that which I respect. Until there is a change in the logistics that puts one side at a disadvantage, winning and losing should not be the rationale. With the exception of a handful of games, we have always been competitive with Florida, and the location had nothing to do with that.
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Does it seem that ole President Morehead and the AD might be on different wave lengths?
http://www.ajc.com/news/sports/college/ugas-morehead-says-bulldogs-will-continue-to-sched/nfkkQ/
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I wish McGarrity would realize the players are bored with the cupcakes and the fans are too. The stadium is electric when the team has something to play for.
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We should all mail McGarity our unused tickets from the Troy game the Monday after…
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We’re not good enough to plow through the cupcakes like the other SEC and ACC teams do. Our special teams, defense, and lack of focus made every matchup except Kentucky a fourth quarter game last season.
If that’s the way we play, then we might as well play someone interesting.
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pretty much. It isn’t the schedule, it is the focus/coaching of the team combined with having players suspended thanks to tougher rules than the majority of the team UGA plays.
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UGA also never lost a bowl game to the Big10 until a few years, now there are 2.
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