Ole Miss 17 Georgia 52

Dear God, it was a bloodbath last night, the kind of football game that makes one question everything. LOL. Ole Miss could not compete with Georgia, at all. The score, lopsided though it is, is believe-it-or-not a poor indicator of just how thoroughly uneven this contest actually was. It was a bloodbath. A massacre.

Jaxson Dart, the Ole Miss quarterback, got knocked out. I’m not being figurative. Literally, Dart took a hard hit at the end of a run and lost consciousness; he was lying on the grass in Stanford Stadium eyes closed and motionless. I’d written last post about how the Rebels were going to be playing without Micah Pettus at right guard and how disastrous that could be for Ole Miss’ chances, and I’m telling you, I didn’t emphasize it nearly enough. On the first Ole Miss drive, another big man went down, can’t remember his name, and he limped off the field, and all of the sudden Ole Miss was using its third right guard. The starting center had to move over to fill in the hole, and by the fourth quarter, with Spencer Sanders filling in for Dart at quarterback, the Rebels were playing someone at center who could not accurately shotgun-snap the football to save his life, and Sanders found himself taking all of the snaps high, so high that he had to jump just to get his hands on the football. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. It was something like seven consecutive high snaps. Suffice it to say, the Ole Miss offensive line was decimated, the offensive rendered impotent. The Rebels could not compete.

The announcers mentioned it a little, but mostly in contrast to praising Georgia’s offensive line, which was healthy, deep, and loaded with “four and five-star players”. I almost shit myself when this ESPN broadcast put up a graphic showing that the Georgia team has 42 “four and five-star” players compared to Ole Miss’ 18, and the announcers stating that Ole Miss’ 18 is respectable for just about any team, but Georgia’s 42 puts it in an elite group with Alabama and Ohio State. I’ve never seen that before. Never. These announcers were explicity calling attention to the business surrounding this “amateur” sport full of genius “student-athletes”, and I think that that is different. I’ve written about this before, and it is happening right out in the open, like I said, that college football is undergoing a sea change, dropping the pretense of amateurism and just embracing itself as the de facto and highly popular minor league for the NFL. The ESPN announcers couldn’t stop talking about how Brock Bowers, the Georgia star tight end, was going to have a great NFL career, along with McConkey, the flanker they also seemed to really like.

It’s true. The Rebels offensive line was absolutely decimated, while the Georgia offensive line just rotated 4 and 5-star players, these huge 300-350 lb. monsters, and the Ole Miss defense couldn’t do anything to stop them. The Georgia offensive moved the football as freely as I’ve ever seen a team move it. It was not a competive game, at all. It was more akin to watching lambs being led to the slaughter. Ole Miss would have done just as well to forfeit the game, stay home, and order out some Shaqaroni from Papa Johns. I mean that, not in a sour grapes sort of way, either. Dart was lying unconscious on the field, McConkey, according to Holly Rowe, the rotund side-line reporter, was going into the medical tent because he had blood dripping down his leg. Another Georgia player shambled off the field grimacing in pain while holding what looked to be a broken forearm. Another Georgia player, its star linebacker, was sitting out because he had a rod in his arm. Bowers had returned this game because he’d had surgery on his leg, something the ESPN announcers literally could not stop talking about, how superhuman he was for returning to the field so soon. Nobody bats and eye at all this injury. It’s a kind of goofy.

It was the kind of football game that makes one question why he’s a fan of this sport at all, and that’s not because the Rebels lost per se. I’m an Ole Miss fan. I know about losing football games. This game was like watching Goliath torture David, like watching Mike Tyson punch a toddler, or something like that, and that, combined with the big-business aspect of it laid bare by the scummy ESPN crew, combined with all the injuries, seeing Jaxson lying on the ground unconcious and motionless, well, this is not how I want to spend my free time. I’ll leave it there.

Congratulations to Georgia, which made Ole Miss squeal like a pig.

The Rebels play ULM next week, which is a win, and they finish the season on “black Friday” against a bad Mississippi State team, and that ought to be a win, but that’s assuming Kiffin and company figures out the limping offensive line. The game against the bulldogs at MSU is always a screwball. But, assuming Ole Miss wins that game, that’s 10-2 football team, and that a great season for Ole Miss any year, but at what cost?

Here’s where I write my obligatory hotty toddy: Hotty Toddy!