In which we’ve got emotions.
I didn’t really want to write anything this week. Then I figured that maybe writing about it would help me process it all; it hasn’t. I’ve got eighteen million thoughts rattled around my emotionally exhausted brain and there’s no way to tame them all into a cohesive narrative that makes any sense. Maybe Friday night just broke me, I dunno; I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that I’ve never experienced anything like that before. The best I can do here is present vignettes of the major things I’m thinking and feeling.
On Playing to Not Lose
Haynes King scored to put us up 14 with 5:37 left on the clock. At this point we had allowed under 250 yards and were routinely getting them in third downs (and routinely not allowing them to convert those third downs). Instead of continuing to do what had been working all night though, someone got possessed by the disembodied spirit of Ted Roof and decided to play the softest bend-don’t-break defense of all time. That NEVER WORKS and of course this wasn’t the exception – Carson Beck hit checkdowns and short passes for 75 yards down the field in just under two minutes to get it back to a 7 point deficit. The fumble on our ensuing drive was obviously a bigger single moment, but not at least making them earn that TD in 4+ minutes was egregious. I can’t stand it when we do this; it’s cropped up several times over the last few years and every. single. time. it bites us.
On Being Angry
F*** MAN. F***. GOD. F***.
On Being Out of Body
The final stages of this game were nothing short of absurd, dark comedy. Sitting there watching Kirby call his tenth timeout of the game, I groaned Please God just let it end and could not imagine a worse hell. I experienced the final seven OTs with the overwhelming feeling that some cosmic Jigsaw was playing a cruel prank on both sides. The whole thing still baffles me days later. It was one of those games that you might see between two teams you don’t care about and say “this is entertaining, but boy am I glad to not be invested in this mess”, except this time it was our poor souls that the ridiculous trauma was being inflicted on. Human beings weren’t meant to endure that. I watched no football on Saturday; I had completely lost my appetite.
On Running the Ball
How many times this season have Haynes King and Jamal Haynes run a zone read that gained at least three yards? How many times has an outside run, or pitch, or fake pitch, or WR end-around gained the same? I don’t claim to know ball, but I was completely baffled at the play-calling in OT. After a night where we gained 260 rushing yards on 5.5 yards per attempt, why the hell did we almost exclusively run pass plays for our two point conversion attempts? I think it was six straight pass plays, then a busted trick play with a lucky flag, then finally a designed run straight up the middle. All season our strength has been on the ground and with the biggest game of the season on the line we abandoned it in favor of WR matchups against a more physical and talented team. They settled in and played the 8 OTs with calm confidence while we seemed to just be throwing things at the wall, hoping something would stick. Someone smarter than me please explain, because to my uneducated brain it looks like we completely outsmarted ourselves.
On The World Being Unfair
Haynes King doesn’t deserve this. After a season of injury and adversity, he put together maybe the greatest individual effort we’ve ever seen. He’s the first player ever with 300 passing yards, 100 rushing yards, and three rushing TDs against a top-10 team. Add two passing TDs and a 72% completion rate to that – it’s a one-of-one achievement. In the biggest game on the biggest stage, he poured his body and soul into a career performance. We didn’t deserve to ask this much of him but he gave us everything and more. If there’s one thing I keep coming back to, it’s being completely gutted for him; his postgame interview was painfully raw and utterly heartbreaking. He deserved to be carried off that field on everyone’s shoulders. He deserved to come back to Atlanta a hero. He deserves the world in 2025.
On Moral Victories
Moral victories are stupid. I hate being told that we should be proud of such a fight. I hate being told we’ll get ‘em next year. I hate being told that it’s a sign of things to come. I know in my head that these statements are objectively true but it’s hard to convince the emotional side of my brain of anything but misery and anguish. We’ve experienced a lot in this fandom over the past several years, but the sheer scale and absurdity of this calamity proves that you can always be hurt more. I feel like my heart has been ripped out and cut to ribbons; believing really sucks sometimes.
On Overtime Rules
Wow do these need to be changed. I don’t mind the alternating two point attempts – I think that’s a perfectly fine compromise to avoid dragging out longer “drives” (unless we suddenly decide we’re okay with ties again). But timeouts and changing ends of the field need to be gone yesterday. The timeouts were beyond ridiculous – they alone added 15 minutes to the time and served no real purpose other than silly mind games. Changing ends of the field every time also serves little to no purpose; I guess it’s there to prevent the away team from always playing into the student section or something, but at that point I’m not sure it really matters. Do a coin toss to decide which end to play on, and stick with it until the game ends.
On Perpetual Misery
Does it ever get better? Will things ever change? Are we doomed in this matchup forever? With five minutes left in this godforsaken game we needed just one of about 15 things to go our way and we struck out at 0-15. Everything to me is always tinged by what college football will look like in 5-10 years and what our place in it will be. I don’t think the evil red empire shares my concerns – they’ll happily reload 10 5*s every year with their eyes closed and rake in cash from the catbird seat as we edge closer and closer to superconferences. It’s hard to convince myself that we didn’t just choke away one of our last realistic chances to take them down. If we couldn’t win that game against them, then what game can we win?
On a Haunting
Not much in football holds a more haunted aura than kicking; ask any fan about their most gut-wrenching moments and you’re pretty likely to hear about being on the wrong side of a FG. After NC State I thought we had figured out kicking; I thought we had moved past the early season struggles. I wouldn’t have felt good about a windy 50 yard-er, but I certainly didn’t expect to see one missed from 25. Geoff Collins might be gone, but the stench of his disastrous special teams is still in the walls.
On Interfering with Passes
I hate when fans blame the refs. It’s childish and usually comes from a misguided sense of “everyone is out to get my team specifically”. But MAN is it frustrating to have the entire national audience upset on our behalf for the 4th down endzone PI and the targeting no-call. Both were game-changing single plays, both went against us, and both were questionable. There’s no conspiracy here – I’m not on board with “the SEC refs ensured that they got another team into the playoff” – but it sucks to see bad refereeing have such a negative impact on a game. “Don’t put yourself in a situation where one call can change the game” and all, but ugh.
On Finding Solace in the Path
We just took the pre-season #1 and favorite to win the national championship to eight overtimes; it took a coin flip simulator to separate us. Hell, we took them to the woodshed for meaningful stretches of the game even though they were 20 point favorites. Right now, people around the country are placing national championship bets on a team that was lucky to escape us – and those bets might cash.
We won seven games in a year where most outlets had us winning four or five. We did that while losing our star QB for a stretch (possibly never having had him healthy to begin with) and dealing with a host of other injuries at just about every position. We played nine bowl teams, four of which are ranked in the final regular season AP Poll (two of those are top 5). Two of our losses to those ranked teams were by a FG or less. We held a lead in all but one single game. Three of our losses came against teams that I think we’d beat if we played again right now.
Nothing about Friday night changes the path. It hurts, it infuriates, it sparks hopelessness, it feels like we were robbed by the universe. But it did nothing to detract from the trajectory of this program, and the bigger picture is still there. There’s a Kipling quote that’s inscribed at Wimbledon: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same”. Individual results are ephemeral and fleeting; it’s the journey that matters – this was but one disaster on our long road that will surely feature more. All we can do is give ourselves to that road and trust in the promise of where it leads.
We return a lot of production next season, and right now we have the #17 recruiting class in the country. If that holds it’ll be our highest ranked class in this millennium. We’ve proven we can hang with anyone, and we’ve shown that the ceiling is high. The path is set, we just need to keep walking it.