OPINION

By Matt Hayes

updated 11:34 p.m. ET Aug. 29, 2008

Matt Hayes

For the love of God, it was Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt. Yet there were the Bulldogs, jumping up and down like a bunch of lunatics, taunting and trashing the poor saps from Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt.

"There were so many things wrong with that night," says Georgia coach Mark Richt. "More than anything, it was embarrassing."

And eye-opening. This is what it had come to last fall at Georgia: After years of building a program in his stoic, steady image, after years of winning championships and doing it all with respect and integrity, Richt found himself grabbing players by their jerseys and yanking them away from the scrum as they jumped up and down on the midfield logo at Vanderbilt Stadium after a last-second victory over a double-digit underdog.

Since when did Georgia, a heavyweight in the big, bad SEC, thump its chest after beating the league's tomato can with a late field goal? Since when did Georgia, which begins every year with the goal of winning it all, settle for the mediocrity of the moment?

It's like Tom Brady in a Bentley taunting you in your minivan.

"Looking back at it," says Georgia quarterback Matthew Stafford, "it probably wasn't the right thing to do."

Looking back, it changed Georgia's season — it jump-started a talented but wayward team that quickly righted wrongs, won a BCS bowl and now finds itself as the team to beat going into this season. No team is as balanced as Georgia; no team can match its combination of skill players on offense and speed and experience on defense.

After finishing last year as the nation's No. 2 team, the Dawgs start this fall as the No. 1 team in the AP and coaches' polls. And they can thank Vanderbilt.

For months we've heard of Georgia's cathartic victory last year over Florida, about how the Bulldogs finally found themselves in the big rivalry and ... blah, blah, blah. That game would mean nothing without the two games that set it up, the two doses of humility that flipped a switch on a suddenly stale team.

It all began on a steamy night in Knoxville, when wounded Tennessee thumped Georgia for the third time in four years. A year before, Georgia had been 5-0 before a blowout loss to the Vols began an ugly 4-4 finish to the season and some internal strife about the direction of the program.

Nine wins at most programs is cause to celebrate. Nine wins at Georgia translates to reflection and recommitment. The four-loss 2006 season — and a loss to West Virginia in the Sugar Bowl a year earlier — had one of the nation's most consistent programs reeling. Richt gave play-calling duties to offensive coordinator Mike Bobo and focused more on managing the team.

So last year when the Bulldogs lost at home to South Carolina in Week 2, when Tennessee punked Georgia again, when Richt saw his players dancing — dancing! — after a win over Vanderbilt, the time had come for some serious evaluation. The team that had tanked the previous season was on the verge of doing it again.

"Mark is one of those — what do you call them? — self-realization guys," says Florida State coach Bobby Bowden, Richt's mentor and a friend Richt still calls during the season for advice. "Some coaches get so wrapped up in what they're doing, in doing things their way and not changing, it becomes counterproductive. Part of Mark, I think, was concerned, Could that be happening to me?"

It is here that we introduce Florida week — or as Stafford says, "the week everything changed." The week Georgia became a complete team because Richt went against everything he believed from the day he started coaching as a graduate assistant at Florida State in the mid-1980s.

Good emotion can fuel a team; bad emotion (see: Vanderbilt) can wreck it. So during the open week before the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party — with Georgia's psyche still bruised from the loss to Tennessee, the ugly win at Vanderbilt and the reality that the Bulldogs had lost 15 of the past 17 games to the hated Gators — Richt came up with an idea. A contrived, hokey idea to manufacture passion and keep his team emotionally charged for the biggest game of the season.

After Georgia's first score against Florida, all 11 players on the field were to celebrate and earn a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty — or everyone on the team would be running wind sprints at 6 a.m. Sunday morning in Athens. Seemed easy enough.

"Only somebody in the crowd thought I meant everybody. And everybody went," Richt says of the Georgia players who flooded onto the field from the sideline. "But when I saw that exuberance, when I saw that energy, when I saw the passion and the fire get unleashed that had been dormant in this football team, I got excited. I got fired up."

A couple of hours later, Georgia's shocking 42-30 win featured the most points the Bulldogs had scored in the series since a guy named Herschel ran over the Gators 25 years earlier. A couple of months later — after the Dawgs had reeled off five more wins, including an emasculation of Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl — Georgia president Michael Adams publicly demanded a national playoff because — why else? — Georgia got screwed by the confounding BCS.

So now here we are: The Dawgs are everyone's preseason No. 1, with a quarterback (Stafford) who could develop into the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft, a tailback (Knowshon Moreno) who's a preseason Heisman Trophy favorite and a stout defense that brings back memories of the Junkyard Dawgs from decades ago.

Last year's team won 11 games with a young offensive line and a quarterback still embracing the subtleties of when to play smart and when to take chances. As Stafford grew up, the offense became more balanced and kept teams from focusing on Moreno. By the time Georgia was resting everyone remotely close to the starting lineup in the fourth quarter of the 41-10 rout of Hawaii, expectations for this fall had begun to soar.

It's a simple formula, really: Sixteen starters return — nine from a top 15 defense — for what will be the best team in the nation's best conference.

Though, the Bulldogs will have to play without left tackle Trinton Sturdivant, who suffered a season-ending knee injury in a scrimmage on Monday. The sophomore will undergo reconstructive surgery next week and might need a full year of rehab.

But if the BCS controversy of the past two seasons means anything, it's good to be the lead Dawg in the SEC.

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