The waiting is almost over, Sanford Stadium will soon look like THIS again!



For me, waiting for college football season to arrive equates to my children's anticipation of Christmas beginning around Thanksgiving. Nevertheless, I always try to keep the building excitement in check when we are still two or three weeks away or I cannot do anything productive at work. However, I have now officially hit the point of no return and I cannot go three minutes without thinking about or wanting to talk to somebody about the coming season. In particular, the opener against Oklahoma State bears significant interest for me since my business partner and good friend, Ed Hall, is an OSU graduate. Fortunately, his wife Allyson and her family are all devout Bulldawgs.

Ed is a Cowboys fan but he will not need counseling and a gross of Xanax if the Dawgs beat them in the opener. I, on the other hand, still cannot stop myself from caring too much about seeing our team do well. That is putting it mildly, anyway. Because of the variance in our respective levels of fandom, there is no hard-core trash talking taking place. His take is that this is a game that Georgia should win, but OSU will come into it with nothing to lose. He believes it will go one of two ways... (1) Georgia jumps out early and the Pokes never close to within a one possession game but linger about 10 points back until the end; or (2) the Pokes jump out early, possible by a couple of touchdowns and try like hell to hold off the late surge by the Dawgs. He does not expect a see-saw game. Again, he does not live and die OSU football, so his assessment is based on their performances the past 2 or 3 years. He does expect them to become increasingly more competitive with all that Boone Pickens money pouring in like a big ole gravy train with fluffy biscuit wheels. He also says to ignore the loudmouths on the message boards because they do not reflect the typical OSU fan. We know the feeling. The bottom line for Ed is that he is looking forward to a fun trip to Athens and he hopes to keep Allyson from getting into a fistfight. (Not really.)

I am still considering how I feel the game will progress. I keep vacillating between a repeat of Boise State or West Virginia (except we win in the end.) Most likely, it will fall somewhere in between. The timing of those two contests had a lot to do with our teams mental preparation. I think our team was acutely focused for the Boise game, having had an entire off-season to look forward to that game as an opener and being told by all of the media that this game was the upset special of the week (similar to our imminent contest.) Conversely, we were totally overconfident going into the WVU game in the Sugar Bowl and got stung by the blazing speed of Slaton and White. I cannot see how we could be overconfident going into the OSU game with so many players getting their first start and/or first playing time in a UGA uniform. I will let my thoughts about this game ruminate for another day and then try to synthesize my opinion about what I expect to see Saturday evening, in addition to tens of thousands of the most gorgeous ladies on the planet.

Such as...



and

Such as...



and one more...