The Georgia Bulldogs and Alabama Crimson Tide aren’t your normal college football rivalry. But lately, when these two teams meet, everything has been on the line.
The Georgia and Alabama football teams haven’t been historic rivals in the same way that the Auburn vs. Alabama or Florida vs. Georgia provides the heat of decades of mutual enmity. But in 2022, Georgia and Alabama dominated the college football landscape in a way that had them staring each other down, even when they weren’t on the field together.
2022 began with Georgia knocking off Alabama in the National Championship game, 33-18. Alabama was ranked No. 1 to begin the 2022-23 season with the defending champion Bulldogs at No. 2. There were no regular season matchups this season but they were battling for the top spot in the rankings until Alabama took losses at the hands of Tennessee and LSU. The SEC is even considering tinkering with its schedule structure to make sure these two powerhouses are playing more often in the regular season.
As part of our Fandoms of the Year project, we’re taking this week to celebrate some of the best rivalries of 2022. To get more perspective on the Alabama vs. Georgia rivalry, and what it felt like to be on either side of it in 2022, we’re turning it over to some of their biggest fans.
The Georgia Bulldogs perspective
Georgia and Alabama isn’t necessarily a traditional rivalry, but since the Dawgs poached head coach Kirby Smart from the Tide, it has escalated. Alabama has dominated the Dawgs throughout history. On paper, this matchup isn’t defined as a normal rivalry. When you look at the last 20 years, it is a rivalry that has even bigger implications when these two teams meet.
Sure, the Tide leads the overall series 42-26-4, winning seven of the last eight matchups. However, only three of those were regular-season games. The other five were either SEC Championship games or National Championship games. When these two teams meet, it’s on some of the biggest stages with the most on the line. This matchup is a new kind of rivalry that plays for championships and rankings, not just another notch on the win/loss column.
That magnitude is what makes the hatred between Georgia and Alabama fans unique. Georgia went from taking on Alabama every four or so years to facing the Tide every postseason — or so it seems. The Tide held a firm grasp on this rivalry in four of the last five postseason matchups, but the Dawgs finally knocked Alabama off its high horse last year.
Georgia took over the rankings last year after the Tide fell to Texas A&M and the Dawgs finished the regular season 12-0. Of course, the Tide got the best of Georgia in the SEC Championship Game, but the Dawgs bounced back stronger than ever. Since that loss in Atlanta, Georgia has gone 12-0 while Alabama has gone 9-3.
Alabama has made history in the last 15 years, but now Georgia is making its own history. Smart owns the SEC East, but getting that win over his former boss in the national title game, flipped a switch. It’s poetic that ending a seven-game losing streak to the one team that Georgia could never get past is how that legacy gained some footing.
— Savannah Richardson, FanSided Associate Editor
The Alabama Crimson Tide perspective
Alabama Football and the Georgia Bulldogs have a long history. For Alabama fans, losing to the Dawgs, even in a National Championship game is more a blip than a trend. Maybe that would not be true, had the Crimson Tide not beaten the Dawgs seven straight times from 2008 through December 2021.
There is some bizarre history between the programs. In 1962, a Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant coached Crimson Tide beat a Wally Butts-coached Bulldogs team, 35-0. Bryant and Butts were old friends. A few months after the game, the Saturday Evening Post published a shocking story.
… how Wally Butts and ‘Bear’ Bryant rigged a game last fall… Butts (gave) Bryant, head coach at the University of Alabama, an outline of Georgia plays and defensive patterns
Bryant already had a libel suit against the Post, for a story the magazine did accusing him of brutality. Bryant and Butts, in separate suits, challenged the Post’s game-fixing story. Both men won hefty financial settlements.
For fans today, recent history is more compelling. One game, in the Crimson Tide’s streak of seven wins, is considered one of college football’s all-time greatest games. Since Alabama Football won the 2017 National Championship in Atlanta, the Crimson Tide has beaten the Dawgs twice more in Atlanta. Many Alabama football fans call Atlanta the Crimson Tide’s second home, justified by early season and postseason wins going back to 2008.
The Crimson Tide boast must rankle Georgia fans since Athens, Ga. and Atlanta are only 70 miles apart.
The Nick Saban vs. Kirby Smart dynamic makes the two programs rivals. So does the status of the two programs in the SEC and nationally. Still, Georgia has work left to be considered Alabama’s biggest rival.
In a recent Bama Hammer poll, 62.7 percent of responses picked Auburn as the Crimson Tide’s biggest rival, followed by Tennessee at 23.7 percent. Georgia received 9.6 percent of the votes. Had the same question been posed three seasons ago, LSU would have likely been the third-highest choice.
Alabama football fans remain inclined to think of the Georgia Bulldogs as a Johnny-come-lately rival to the Crimson Tide. A National Championship Game loss to the Dawgs does give pause. Did it mark a sea change with the Bulldogs as the SEC’s currently most dominant program? Most Crimson Tide fans think not.
— Ronald Evans, Bama Hammer site expert