Georgia sleeps this Christmas with visions of Sugar Bowls dancing in its head. Yet no matter how much joy and anticipation the upcoming College Football Playoff brings, the Bulldogs have already gotten a win this month that should be celebrated among the best in the program’s recent history.
This year’s SEC championship is undoubtedly a game that UGA fans will be telling stories about for years to come.
They’ll talk about Gunner Stockton stepping in for an injured Carson Beck, Trevor Etienne overcoming an injury of his own to score the game-winning touchdown and a defense that got after Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers so relentlessly that perhaps he started to agree with Longhorns message board posters who were wishing they’d play Arch Manning.
However, the score and stats of the Bulldogs’ win against Texas are not the complete story. To truly understand the game, one has to appreciate the context of how it fits into a larger narrative.
College football is enduring a period of change for reasons that are all too familiar to us during the holiday season: the seemingly inevitable creep of commercialism.
Dr. Pepper parodied this well recently in a Fansville ad that featured a surprise appearance from the Aflac duck in which one of the main characters cried out, “my whole life is a commercial.”
Yet more advertising logos and sponsored segments are the sort of thing most fans made peace with long ago. What’s a little harder to accept for many is that executives in boardrooms are starting to impact the way the game looks on the field.
The College Football Playoff is obviously big business and certain leagues — such as the SEC and Big Ten — are more lucrative for that business than others. Therefore, the chase by programs to join these power players has led to conferences expanding faster than Santa’s waistline.
The trend began when the SEC announced plans to add Texas and Oklahoma in 2021. In the time since, Georgia, and the league’s other legacy members, have had to put on a happy face about the conference’s new additions.
Perhaps, if we’re being honest, not always such an easy thing to do in the case of Texas.
“They have a very high opinion of themselves, which is not surprising — but not always justified,” R. Bowen Loftin, the former chancellor of Texas’ in-state rival Texas A&M said of the Longhorns in 2021. “The fit, culturally of A&M and the SEC is very good. The fit of Texas is not. That’s just plain and simple.”
Whether they’re a good fit or not, the Longhorns are here, and the cash they bring with them is a big reason why.
Texas has an endowment that rivals even the most prestigious private universities. It also once had its own television network and it’s proving to be a major factor in the NIL space, so much so that Manning — a true freshman with a well-known last name — has an NIL valuation of $5 million, according to On3.
Texas also recently went head-to-head with Georgia over a five-star recruit in the 2025 class, defensive lineman Justus Terry, who chose the Longhorns at the last minute after months of speculation that he’d join the Bulldogs.
Unfortunately though for the Longhorns, getting to the top spot in the fundraising game is proving to be easier than becoming the best on the football field.
You can thank Kirby Smart, who has shown a noticeable edge after both wins this season.
In October, when the Bulldogs won in Austin, Smart seemed to mirror the cynicism Loftin had once expressed about Texas, with its big wallet and prodigious self esteem.
The Longhorns’ sideline that day was packed with celebrities, including actors Matthew McConaughey and Glen Powell. However, Smart made it clear in a postgame interview that he wasn’t impressed by any of that.
“Our intent was not to take pictures, not to do all the superstar stuff,” Smart said. “Our intent was to eat.”
Smart was just as salty after the SEC championship as well.
A viral moment from Georgia’s postgame celebration featured Smart ribbing SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who Smart said had sent his team “on the road all year long.”
Smart was referencing Georgia’s trio of away games against highly ranked teams — at Alabama in September, at Texas in October and at Ole Miss in November — giving the Bulldogs one of the toughest schedules in college football.
Yet Smart’s comment could also be said to hint at the sharp contrast between the gauntlet run by UGA and the seemingly easier path traveled by Texas. The SEC had seven teams win at least nine games this season, but Georgia was the only one of those teams Texas played.
Whatever Smart’s intended message was, fans couldn’t get enough of it. And that memory should provide comfort as Georgia begins the College Football Playoff.
There’s no shortage of songs and movies at Christmas that conjure up feelings of nostalgia, but when it comes to college football, Georgia fans don’t have to spend time longing for the good old days. They can instead appreciate the SEC championship as an early holiday gift — one that shows that even as the sport evolves, the Bulldogs’ place atop seems unchanged.
