The following piece was written by Tim Tucker and published on December, 6 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Georgia’s football team will play in a bowl game for the 13th consecutive season, albeit a lower-tier bowl than customary.
The Independence Bowl announced Sunday that Georgia and Texas A&M will meet on Dec. 28 in Shreveport. The game will kick off at 5 p.m. and be nationally televised on ESPN2.
The Bulldogs were invited to the Independence Bowl after eight other SEC teams, including four with the same 7-5 record as Georgia, accepted invitations to bowls that rank higher in the conference’s postseason pecking order.
Georgia athletics director Damon Evans and coach Mark Richt reacted graciously to the invitation to Shreveport.
“It was kind of a big wad of [7-5] teams, and to try to sort it out and make a lot of good sense of where everybody should go, I thought that was hard for everybody,” Richt said Sunday evening. “I had no preconceived ideas where we might go or should go. I was just thankful we got ourselves in a situation where we could play this bowl game and play on national TV one more time and coach these seniors one more time.”
Evans noted a personal connection to the Independence Bowl.
“I played in it before as a student athlete,” he said, referring to the Dogs’ only previous trip to the Shreveport game in 1991, “and I know what the Independence Bowl has to offer. We look forward to playing a very good Texas A&M team.”
The Aggies finished the regular season 6-6 (3-5 in the Big 12), losing three of their last four games. They lost to Texas, which is headed to the BCS national-championship game, 49-39 on Thanksgiving night despite a terrific performance by junior quarterback Jerrod Johnson, who passed for 342 yards and four touchdowns and ran for 97 yards against the Longhorns’ defense.
The Aggies figure to present a formidable challenge to a Georgia defense that will be short on coaches. The three defensive coaches fired by Richt last week — coordinator Willie Martinez, John Jancek and Jon Fabris – declined Richt’s offer to stay on the job through the bowl.
Richt said he will work with defensive-line coach Rodney Garner and two graduate assistants, Todd Hartley and Mitch Doolittle, to prepare the defense for the Aggies, who have one of the nation’s most prolific offenses.
“It’ll be a great challenge and a great opportunity for those young guys [the grad assistants] and our defensive players to step up to the plate and really do everything they can to help facilitate the situation we’re in,” Richt said.
Richt said he won’t designate an interim defensive coordinator for the bowl and that “probably 99 percent” of his time on the practice field this month will be focused on defense.
The Aggies rank No. 5 among the 120 major-college teams in total offense, averaging 465.3 yards per game. They rank 22nd nationally in passing offense (274.9 yards per game) and 25th in rushing offense (190.4).
On the other hand, the Aggies rank 107th in the nation in total defense, giving up 431.3 yards per game. They are 111th in pass defense and 87th in rushing defense.
Evans said Georgia has an allotment of about 12,000 tickets to sell for the game.
“Winning that last game [over Georgia Tech], we expect our fans to have some excitement and travel well,” Evans said. “We are going to sell as many tickets as we possibly can.”
Tickets are available online at Georgiadogs.com and by phone at 1-877-542-1231.
Georgia has not played Texas A&M since the Bulldogs’ national-championship season of 1980, when the Dogs beat the Aggies 42-0 in Athens. Georgia lost its other three games against Texas A&M, all in the 1950s.
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