You want to talk about rivalry games? Fine. Let me tell you about what a rivalry used to mean because this whole conference realignment mess we have now with Texas and Oklahoma coming in and the old SEC East going away, it makes me sick. I remember the 1981 Georgia vs Clemson game, the one where we were ranked number one and they came into Sanford Stadium and beat us 13-3. That game meant something because we played them every single year, it was a real border war, and the whole state of Georgia stopped breathing for four quarters. Now we barely play Clemson and when we do it is some made up neutral site game in Atlanta that feels like an exhibition. That is not a rivalry.
You watch what happened to the Georgia Tech game and that is the one that cuts the deepest. We played those engineers every single year since 1925 without fail and it was the greatest hate week in college football. I was in the stands in 1992 when we went to Atlanta and Garrison Hearst ran all over them, 31-17, and you could feel the hate in that stadium. It was real. It was personal. It was about state pride and recruiting battles and families fighting at Thanksgiving dinner. Now we play them once every few years and nobody under 25 even remembers what Clean Old Fashioned Hate used to feel like. The portal killed the continuity and the conference realignment killed the scheduling and now we just play whoever the TV networks tell us to play.
And do not get me started on what happened to the Florida game. I know we still play them every year because of the SEC scheduling but it is not the same since they moved it to different weekends and startted talking about moving it out of Jacksonville. That game in the 1990s was the defining moment of every season. The 1997 game when we beat them 37-17 and I thought we were finally going to break through. The 1984 game when we were unranked and they were number 10 and we beat them 27-24 in the rain. You cannot manufacture that history with NIL money and portal classes. You earn it over decades of hate and blood and sweat and tears.
The kids today do not understand what they are missing. They see a game on the schedule and they think it is just another opponent. They do not understand that when I was growing up you circled three games on the calendar every single year: Auburn, Florida, and Georgia Tech. Those games defined who you were as a man. You lost to Georgia Tech and you could not show your face at the grocery store for a week. You lost to Florida and you had to listen to Gator fans for 365 days. That is what rivalry means. That is what we have lost. And I will die on this hill that the sport has never recovered from what we gave up when we let the TV executives and the conference commissioners destroy the schedule.