David Hale tweeted this out yesterday:
Discussion I was just having: Is there a reasonable case to be made that these are the 5 most agonizing Georgia losses of the past 20 years?
2008 vs Bama
2012 SECCG vs Bama
2017 champ game vs Bama
2018 SECCG vs Bama
2021 SECCG vs Bama— 💫🅰️♈️🆔 (@ADavidHaleJoint) December 20, 2021
My response was (1) ’08 and ’21 were more disappointing than agonizing and (2) you can’t have an agonizing list that doesn’t include ’13 Auburn.
Your mileage may vary, obviously, so share your pain in the comments.
Filed under Georgia Football
“We remember the Sugar Bowl, I think it my junior year of high school, we let Alabama beat us twice,” Brinson said of a team that also lost to the Crimson Tide in the SEC Championship game. “We’re not letting Alabama beat us twice. In the Sugar Bowl in 2018, they… thought they should have been in the playoffs and lost to Texas.” -- AB-H, 12/27/23
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’08 Bama is a stretch to call agonizing. We were definitely put in our place. That Tennessee game in 2016 was agonizing.
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Bama 2012, Auburn 2013, and Bama 2018 were all painful. That 2012 Georgia team especially Chris Conley didn’t deserve the outcome. That game at Auburn was just freakish after we came all the way back to take the lead. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I still can’t watch the end of the Bama game (I haven’t watched a replay of the whole game because I know the ending). I was just mad as hell after Bama 2008 and Bama 2021. I was resigned after LSU 2019.
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Well put
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2016 Tennessee has to be on there.
08, 15, and 21 against Bama were shocking and disappointing but not agony like 12, 17, and 18.
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First I respect the pain in any loss. But 2016 Tennessee doesn’t bother me at all. To think the Vols peaked on a Hail Mary versus a first year coach and our trajectories have been polar opposites since then just leads me to laugh out loud when there’s talk of the “Dobnail Boot”. They act like that game was anything like what Richt did to them. In 01 we signaled their now 20 plus year wanderings in the desert and turned that series upside down to right side up for us. And it ain’t changing because of Butch Jones that’s for damn sure.
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For real
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2021 SECC felt pretty agonizing in the second quarter. In the 3rd quarter, it became disappointing, too. By the end of the game, it was just numbness.
But, what can we do but pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get back in the fight? Rating crushing UGA losses is fine for Hale; it’s purely an academic exercise for him, he’s just a reporter. But at a much lesser level, it’s like asking the mayor of Mayfield, KY which 5 neighborhoods were the most agonizing to have leveled by the tornado?
They all hurt, David. We don’t rate them, we just wait for a chance to repay them. And if we lose again, we just dig in and keep working. Rating them is for scribes with no skin in the game. As a UGA fan, I have zero interest in what seems a fool’s errand. YMMV.
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Yeah… All of those suck and the Auburn game will be forever etched in my memory; though it’s a lot less painful as Kirby continues to stack wins against the Tigers…
I don’t care for Auburn…
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’83 vs the barn left mine self in severe pain (socially) for almost a week…#AUBURN SUCKS!
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‘02 Florida. I was lots younger. Still, that sucked.
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2002 Florida is in that window for another season. That was as worse than all but the natty and the 2012 SECCG. The only saving grace is that in hindsight we’d have gotten the 2004 Auburn treatment behind Miami and Ohio State.
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We were ranked ahead of Ohio State in both polls and the BCS when the Florida game happened.
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https://www.espn.com/college-football/rankings/_/week/11/year/2002/seasontype/2
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Possibly, but the media was absolutely in love with the story of Ohio State’s return. Florida and Tennessee were down and the SEC wasn’t getting anywhere near the respect that it does now. I think they’d have finished ahead of us…but maybe the computers would have given us the edge. It was always going to be a fight over #2 because everyone assumed that Miami team was unbeatable.
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The media was not loving TOSU enough to rank it ahead of us when we had the same number of loses
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2008 Tech, since a win that day would have given us 8 in a row and a tie for the record streak with a chance to set a new record in 2009.
1976 team’s Sugar Bowl. A win could have resulted in a MNC.
2013 Auburn.
2017 and 2018 Alabama.
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Oh man so much this. That stupid 2008 team. I can get so mad at them sometimes.
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I’d only been here a year but the 85 Bama game was wrenching.
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I’m another vote for adding Florida ’02
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02 Florida. 3 top 5 teams lost. We have the Gators without Spurrier and shit the bed. An all timer for pain.
20004 UT. We just beat the defending national champs. We’ve beaten the Vols 4x in a row. And they beat our ass in the 4th quarter.
2012 Bama. The worst
2018 Bama. Gut wrenching
2021 Bama. Miserable.
That might be my top 5.
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I would have to throw 2008 Tech in there, I think. That 2004 Tennessee game was awful though.
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I think 2012 was the most agonizing.
This year was most disappointing because their team brought an A- game and our team brought a C.
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2012 SECCG is #1 on my list.
2015 Georgia/Tennessee is #2
– One week after getting embarrassed at home by Bama
– Nick Chubb (maybe my all-time favorite Dawg), suffers a gruesome knee injury on the very first offensive play
– he had had 13 straight games with 100+ rushing yards, and was poised to break Herschel Walker’s record
– He was having a season for the ages, averaging 8.1 yards/carry through the first 6 games of the season
– I can remember seeing replays of the injury, and Gary Danielson’s comment on how shell-shocked Georgia players looked on the sideline after seeing it
I felt more sick after each of these games than any other.
I think by the time the ’17 NC and ’18 SECCG came around I was already too jaded to feel too sick about losing them in heart-breaking fashion. I was over fretting over each after about 24 hours.
So glad Chubb got to come back and have that ’17 season (with Michel — another DGD!)!
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Ahh, memories. I tend agree with the senator, though I would expand it to 6 and include that come-from-behind tech bullshit win from a few years ago too.
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I prefer not to think about it this close to Christmas..
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Why are you doing this?
I bet Davis Hale takes pictures at funerals and kelps a scrapbook.
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Loss to South Carolina in 2007 was a loooong sloooow pain that you let fester didn’t get checked out and it ultimately turned terminal 3 mos later. Beast of a team.
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The real pain of that 07 SC game is that it was the chaos year that LSU jumped us to the BCS Champ game with 2 losses. Could have been another one that cost us a natty.
If I remember the story right, seems like SC had a spy at practice that week and thus on Saturday SC was ready for all our trickeration stuff.
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A masochist, I am not.
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I think the 2012 game is most mis-remembered game by the fan base of the last 20 years for Georgia. That was a vastly inferior Georgia team that played way above its talent level for 3 quarters then eventually fizzled against the much much better team. 2017 and 2018 we actually went blow for blow with Alabama, 2012 was the huge underdog upset that didn’t happen. We were only even in position to win because Saban made a poor decision to kick a field goal and Alec ogletree returned it for a TD and we pulled off the fake punt. In other words, we were the underdog emptying our bag of tricks because that’s what we had to do against a vastly superior opponent. Alabama racked up 512 yards of offense to our 394 including 350 yards on the ground when Saban decided to stop screwing around and basically pushed dominated Todd Grantham from the 3Q on, repeatedly. Make no mistake, outside of those outlier special teams type plays I mentioned, that game played out about how you’d expect for a team stacked with top ranked recruiting classes against a program that had half assed recruiting for half a decade with a meh coaching staff. People also forget had we pulled off the upset there’s no guarantee we would have beaten Notre Dame. Jon Jenkins was suspended for the bowl game and mark richts record against ranked opponents was pretty awful post 2007 including the 2012 team which went 2-2 against ranked teams including absolutely getting destroyed by south Carolina.
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Good post. I agree with all of it other than I think UGA would have beaten ND handily.
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Who asked you anyway? 😉
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I don’t know how to rank them but if there’s a top 5 tier this year’s seccg is definitely in there and not just due to recency bias. This stupid team actually had me believing they could finally get the monkey off their back and they failed, spectacularly.
2004 Tennessee is also up there we had just destroyed defending champion LSU the week before then lose as a top 3 team to freshman QB Erik ainge the next week. It was also a Georgia sports curse October special where the braves get eliminated from the playoffs the same week the Dawgs lose. Also happened in 2020, 2019, etc. Etc.
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EVERY loss to the Gayturds is agonizing!!!! With extra agony in 2020 as they went on to the SEC Championship! ( and looked good against Bama)
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Worst loss ever was the natty vs. bama.
2012 seccg is a close second.
2002 vs. UF is right there too.
Then PSU.
To me it has to be a championship game and/or cost you a championship game.
The good news is that Michael Johnson caught the 4th and 19….
I only mention that to underscore the disparity between the times we’ve had something big go our way vs. the numbers of brutal kicks in the nuts.
It’s ridiculous. We have Lindsey and Michael Johnson and a couple in the 1970’s one in the 60’s and I can think of a dozen or more just complete wtff billion to one gut shots since 1981 beginning with Dan fucking Marino.
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Sugar Bowl vs. WV was agonizing for sure…
AU same year was agonizing…
UF w/ Joe T dame year was agonizing…same year…
Damn, why those jump to the top of my head?
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How could anything be worse than 2&26 in 2017? From horrible officiating to a busted coverage a championship was in our palm and we let it slip away.
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The dawg fan in me says “wait.”
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‘82 and ‘83 Sugar Bowls. Two miserable experiences to attend in person.
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I made the trip to Nola for the Penn St game…it is claimed by many that we actually attended…a few of us don’t remember. 🙂
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The 2008 Bama wasn’t so much agonizing as it was humiliating. When you’re down 31–0 at halftime, you’ve pretty much eliminated the possibility of a stirring comeback that falls just inches short.
There are a bunch of WLOCPs from the past 20 years that belong in the agonizing category, though, particularly 2002, 2005, and 2010. I’m tempted to throw all three of our losses to Georgia Tech (heh, “all three”) in there too, since they all 1) were really close and 2) meant we’d have to listen to Techie bullshit for another 365 days.
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I refuse to wallow in this particular mire at this stage of the season.
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Some people obviously love it…I agree with you.
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More “Misery” from The Kinks.
“Til ya learn to laugh, you’ll never come to any parties at my house…..”
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I think the 2005 Florida game was pretty goddamn disappointing.
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How bout this: 2012 and 2017 are inarguably the top two; last second losses which would have meant championships (no, there wasn’t a chance we could have lost to Notre Dame. Zero). An argument can be made for all five of them to belong in the top five.
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Saban nearly lost his 4th out of his last 5 @ Auburn this fall but a heisman saved him. Even the dumbass in the state to our east cracked the code, twice. Ask the Hartman Funders & former players if they are looking forward to answering this same question again in February.
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declining to participate
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