This Mike Griffith piece about moving the Cocktail Party out of Jacksonville — something he’s had a raging hard-on about for a while now — is hilarious, if for no other reason than the results of his Twitter poll.
Gee, Georgia fans don’t want to play the game in the Swamp. Who’da thunk it?
Griffith thinks this indicates that Scott Stricklin might have some work to do “in the court of public perception”. Really. You just can’t make this shit up.
Get The Picture 
“That’s where Florida was back then. We can’t help it if they got run out of Lake City.”…Take the game back to Macon, Georgia…GO DAWGS!
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….#FTMF…
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let’s take a one of a kind tradition/game and blow it up.
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All Mike cares about is attention. The game is very special to CFB. Every real fan knows about the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail party even those in Montana. It’s great publicity for both schools.
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Your first sentence is truth.
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Which is why I’ve stopped clicking on his stuff. Nothing but a pot-stirrer.
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Kirby has become rather silent on this topic. Someone has to have told him that he may have the political capital to do this, but he’ll lose a segment of the fan and donor base that will never forgive him for it. No recruiting weekend is worth the hassle that he will deal with by pushing the move the game from Jacksonville.
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Kirby is very clear that he doesn’t like losing that recruiting weekend that he would gain every other year. I think that is a push at the NCAA as much was it is leveraging JAX for more $$$.
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Georgia and Florida have agreed mutually not to host recruits at the Cocktail Party (mainly because they don’t want to lose the tickets that go to donors). My understanding is that the neutral site thing with recruiting is a thing of the past. I believe we and Clemson were able to have recruits in Charlotte.
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I believe the rule is that the school can provide tickets to a neutral site game but cannot provide travel expenses.
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Kirby is leveraging . He knows how important the game is in Jax.
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Not that anyone asked, but I’d absolutely prefer home and home which means Athens and Gainesville over Jacksonville. As would I’d wager everyone that clicked on Jacksonville for UF home games in that stupid twitter poll.
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I’m sorry. I’ve tried to be patient with Griffith. At the end off the day, he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
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I hope he isn’t a Henry Grady grad.
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He reflects the worst of modern hot-take click-bait journalism. They’re not all like that, but it’s a problem.
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Gainesville is a big steaming turd of a town.
Why volunteer to play at an away stadium (insert steaming turd town again)?
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Why you got to be throwing off on turds like that?
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Going on a slight tangent, but another indication the rivalry and the mentality has flipped in Georgias favor is that I as a fan wouldn’t get too upset if they did move it to a home and home even if solely for Kirby to exact several iterations of payback in Gainesville for when the gators hung 50 on us in Athens. Not a great reason to move it but I can’t be the only fan who would love to watch 80% of the swamp empty out like we’ve seen 50% of tiaa / everbank/ alltel/ Jacksonville municipal/ whatever corporate sponsor we’ve whored ourselves out for naming rights to stadium.
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I was in Sanford in 1995. I never want that bunch of tank top, jort and black Reebok wearing north Florida trailer park trash in Athens ever again. This is coming from someone who hasn’t been to Jacksonville in 20+ years.
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It’s almost impossible to get that stank out of the upholstery
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Hey, 50 is 50 no matter where the hanging is!!!
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Mike Griffith is an ass.
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“something he’s had a raging hard-on about for a while now”- he should probably get that checked.
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Send that dude down to Brandee’s (2 es) for the semiannual ring toss championship…it’s sort of on a first come type situation
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Ya. It warns about that right there on the package…
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…more than four hours…”
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All of this could be moot if the SEC goes to a 7-1 schedule. If that ridiculous scenario happens, we have no idea who our 1 might be. You would hope that if we had to lose the South’s Oldest Continuous Rivalry, we’d keep the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, but the SEC brain trust has done much stupider things in the past.
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The Cocktail Party, the Iron Bowl and the Red River Shootout are the only rivalry games that are safe regardless of the scheduling decisions that are being made.
The scheduling discussions should be broadcast live on the SEC Network, so everyone can see who the cowards are in the room.
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You would hope so, but IMHO all evidence points toward college football moving toward an NFL-style scheduling model where it’s all about getting to the playoffs rather than honoring what makes college football special.
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I just don’t see the SEC in a 1-7 scenario making Vanderbilt or even South Carolina (if you want to use a “rival”) our permanent opponent.
The scheduling question is not about the playoffs. It’s about making the SEC’s regular season TV package attractive while at the same time making sure the league is set to move as many teams forward in the process as possible. Those 3 games are a piece of what makes the regular season special (I would say the DSOR and other games as well – I’m a 3 permanent opponent guy).
That’s exactly why Sankey has made it clear he would support an 8-team playoff that has no automatic bids. He knows he likely gets 2 or 3 (maybe even 4) teams in. His working group’s design of the 12-team playoff was a masterpiece (I’m not an expansion advocate). It gave everyone something they wanted:
1) Games on campus
2) Games in bowl locations
3) An open bid for the championship game
4) 6 automatic qualifiers which in most years gives all 5 power conferences bids plus a G5 bid
5) Value of conference championships with the top 4 champions receiving byes
6) ND could remaining independent but traded off that they couldn’t be a top 4 seed
7) At-large teams
The Alliance threw a fit over Texas and Oklahoma and now are cutting off their noses to spite their faces when the 12-team format is better for all of them especially the ACC and the Pac 12.
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Not a lot of material out there, in his opinion I guess…I don’t have the time to waste with AJC writers. Not much in the area of content imo
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When the Jax. game started, UGA said it was for the south GA fans
(they/we could get to the game and get home the same day).
Now it pays about 3 times as much as a home game. TV, money paid by Jax. and everyone pays full price for a ticket (no matter how long you have been a paying member of Hartman group, you pay full price). UGA is not going to move that game, way too much money.
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FFS, don’t these people understand there’s no real possibility of the game leaving Jax? Both schools make a ton of money off of it, and that’s the only thing that matters. They pretend it’s an issue to drive up the price. It’s that simple.
God what a waste of time.
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