Dust Up Over 2018 Georgia Bulldogs Football Schedule Irrelevant

The Georgia Bulldogs football team is going into Spring Practice with some hardware from last year and high expectations for 2018. Their schedule was recently made a national topic.

One could say that Bulldawg Nation has never been this ebullient or excited heading into Spring ball. Now, that person could be wrong. I’d imagine that 1980-1982 was pretty exciting. But this scribe is too young to remember that. So, coming off of an SEC Championship season, a Rose Bowl win, a National Championship birth and heartbreak, and a Number 1 ranked recruiting class, one can definitely say it is the most anticipated year of Georgia Bulldogs football in Athens since then. Yet, the coming schedule has made some national news in recent days, and not in a good way.

This all started when ESPN’s Heather Dinich openly called Georgia’s 2018 non-conference schedule “atrocious”. She went on to say that UGA better win all of their games, if they are to be taken seriously. Then opined about recent worries regarding Wisconsin and Washington and their weak schedules in recent years.

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The AJC picked up on it, naturally, with a couple of articles and a podcast that all approach the subject. In short, they understood the concern, but found the strength of the statement to be unwarranted.

That is where I’m at with this. Look, the non-conference schedule is atrocious. I did my graduate work at the University of Richmond. My Spiders play Massachusetts every year. Trust me. The Dawgs have no business playing the Minute Men.

And that wouldn’t be an issue if that were the only flaccid game on the schedule, but it isn’t. Austin Peay? Check. MTSU? Check. Not exactly a gauntlet.

But here is where I take umbrage with this idea. First, Wisconsin went the entire regular season in 2017 without playing a ranked opponent. Iowa and Michigan were ranked at the time they played Wisky, but neither finished in the CFB Playoff Top-25 rankings. Now, I get that you can only play who is on your schedule, but that is why that was a problem for CFP Committee members and some media.

UGA will have, presumably, three games against teams that very well could be, and some should be, ranked teams in the 2018 regular season: South Carolina, LSU, and Auburn. It’s not too hard to imagine that Florida could even crack the Top-25 this year.

In addition, the Georgia Bulldogs go an entire month without a home game this Fall. I don’t care who you are playing, that requires championship form to go through that with success. And by success, I mean undefeated.

Though, I do hold the MTSU program in high regard, yes, the non-conference record is as tough as two-ply. But the SEC isn’t the Big 10 West.

Any attempted comparison is just battle space preparation for national media folks wanting to keep the SEC to just one team in the College Football Playoff next year.

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And that argument is as weak as Georgia’s non-conference schedule. Possibly, weaker.

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