A Rose Cocktail Party By Any Other Name

Mike Adams can crusade all he wants (and create giant family tailgating zones while taking massive contributions from and publicly honoring alcohol distributors).

CBS & ESPN can accede to their request.

Others can come up with clever substitute names.

But Georgia-Florida is The Cocktail Party and will always be referred to here as such. Actually, it's The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party but I have always called it simply The Cocktail Party and will continue to do so.


When this game becomes a contest between Liberty
& Oral Roberts then I'll stop calling it the Cocktail Party.

Oh, and if Mikey Adams or anyone else thinks that daring not to speak the name of the event is in any way going to reduce the amount of drunkenness/level of partying than he, like me last night, is clearly baked. Will this phrase be uttered once in Jacksonville this weekend?

Person 1: "Damn, Phil, you are fucked up. You better cut back/stop drinking because Mike Adams is 'trying to preach realistic moderation' and disassociate this weekend from drunkenness."
Person 2: "Damn, you're right Steve. Give me an O'Douls and a Poland Spring 1 liter"

Not calling it The Cocktail Party will do about as much to curb drinking this weekend as the using term "collateral damage" will to bringing murdered innocent civilians back to life. In other words: not a damn thing.

Everyone knows that UGA is 2-14 against The Gators in the last 16 years, which pretty much coincides with my time as a Dawg (freshman class of 92). I was there in 92 for the heartbreak. I was there in the rain in 93 for the Anthone Lott soul crusher. I was there in the swamp in 94 for the start-to-finish asskicking. I was there in Sanford in 95 for the only first time an opponent hung half a hundred on a Georgia team between the hedges. I was there countless other times for depressing beatings, and of course I was not there in 97 thanks to my employment in another school's athletic department and in 2004 when I was in Vegas. So like many post-1990 Dawgs I damn near expect for Georgia to find a way to lose to Florida every year, and realistically accept when others refer to them as our "big brother" who regularly doles out beatings to our little punk ass, especially in a year when we barely sneak past Colorado, Ole Miss, and Miss. State and lose at home to Vandy. For shit's sake we went 1-2 against the fucking Zooker.


This pretty much encapsulates The Cocktail Party
since I became a Bulldog. Lucy is even in blue and
Charlie Brown is in (almost) red & black.

The one point of pride that we can hold on to is that we are still 36-26-2 all time against those damn Gators. So amazingly enough, although they have picked up a net 12 games on us in the last 16 years, the would still need to win the next 10 games against us in a row just to draw level in the series. That really shows how much they were our bitches pre-1990, when we batted .739 (34-12-2) against them over an 86 year span before they turned the tide and batted .875 on us over the last 16 years. So keep it up Gators, you are still 10 wins in a row shy of being our historical equal.

That being said, I haven't written much about it this week because I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that we are staring at yet another loss. If 92-93 and 2002-2005 were the "I really think we will win because we are better" years and 94-2001 were the "yes we are massive underdogs but my youthful exuberance and slight myopia make me believe that we can beat the Evil Gators" years, then this year is the "this one has been chalked up as an L for a long while, I'm OK with it, and anything better than a fairly substantial loss will be gravy" year.

I'll still watch, root, and hope for the upset but it's hard to see us playing them close. Their D is nasty; our O is not very good and turnover-y as well. Their O is not great but fairly good; our D is very poor. I would think that Georgia would need to be +2 or 3 in turnovers and maybe have some other fluky shit happen like a KR or PR TD or a pick 6 or whatnot in order to have a chance to win at the end.

If we win then I'll be as happy as anyone, but a loss won't be the soul-crushing depression-fest of Auburn 05, Florida 02, or the like.

I get the sense that most of the Dawg Nation feels the same way. But let's be honest - after 2 beers on Saturday all that realism will go out the window and we'll all be believers again.

Prediction: Georgia 13-38 Florida