Alabama Crimson Tide

Georgia's dream season starts with destroying Alabama

Published Sep. 28, 2015 4:33 p.m. ET

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Stewart Mandel

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from this week's Forward Pass. Click here to read the full column.

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For Georgia fans, Saturday’s date with No. 13 Alabama is both the biggest game Sanford Stadium has hosted in seven years ... and a painful reminder of the one seven years ago.

On Sept. 27, 2008, No. 3 Georgia, led by Matthew Stafford and Knowshon Moreno, hosted the No. 8 Crimson Tide for a primetime showdown. Dawgs fans staged a rare “blackout” for the occasion, which quickly turned sour when Nick Saban’s seven-point underdogs promptly went up 31-0 before halftime.

“That was a long time ago, it’s hard to remember,” Dawgs coach Mark Richt said Sunday when a reporter brought up that night. Suffice to say his fans haven’t forgotten. Thanks to their conference’s scheduling model, the schools have only met once since then — in the 2012 SEC Championship Game, another painful, albeit much closer defeat. They won’t soon forget that one either.

“I don’t hear it, I don’t worry too much about it,” Richt said of those fan flashbacks. “It’s like I’ve said before, if you flunked a math test and you go to the end of the next test and you keep thinking about what you did wrong on the old one, that’s just not good.”

It seems like Richt has been through a lot of those math-test moments during his 15-year tenure. Fairly or unfairly for a guy who’s won 74 percent of his games, he’s often viewed as a coach who “can’t win the big one.” Given the backdrop for this one, he’ll likely hear it again if the Dawgs don’t prevail.

For the first time in 73 games — dating back to the 2009 SEC title game against Florida — oddsmakers on Sunday installed Alabama as an underdog. That Ole Miss loss and continued questions at quarterback (Jake Coker was just 17 of 31 for 158 yards Saturday against Louisiana-Monroe) have raised more doubts about the Tide than there have been since ... well, before that ’08 Georgia game.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s looked awfully good against admittedly light competition (its two SEC wins were against Vanderbilt and South Carolina). But Alabama’s stout defensive front will pose the biggest test to date for quarterback Greyson Lambert. The Virginia transfer has completed a remarkable 33 of 35 passes the past two weeks, but he’s rarely had to throw downfield like he will this week.

Georgia is clearly the class of this year’s mediocre SEC East, and with annual crossover opponent Auburn reeling, the opportunity is there for that truly special season that’s thus far eluded Richt. But that’s got to start with winning a big game in which he’s favored.

Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel and Facebook. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.

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