Georgia football, Braves' NL East title with ESPN's Tom Hart
Welcome to the midway point of another Georgia football game week. The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry hasn’t been much of a rivalry lately.
That doesn’t mean my Wednesday conversation takes a week off.
This week, instead of primarily looking ahead to Auburn, I took a different approach.
ESPN’s Tom Hart was in the booth for play-by-play in Columbia, Missouri, to watch his alma mater almost upset Georgia’s number-one-ranked football team.
Now, Georgia is number two in the country.
Hart’s crew, including SEC football greats Jordan Rodgers and Cole Cubelic, also hit a runner-up benchmark of their own in the game.
The digital stream numbers of this matchup are now officially the second-highest in the history of the SEC Network.
Near upsets still draw a ton of eyeballs, even if they don’t materialize.
Tom Hart was humble about those metrics, and I suppose his perspective makes sense.
It all comes down to people wanting to watch the Top Dawgs.
Just not necessarily for the reasons that Georgia fans would like.
“I retweeted it, and it’s a compliment that so many people were watching it online. It struck me as a second-screen thing,” Hart said.
“I’m curious how many people were watching on ‘linear’ television. Because I think that audience was huge as well. Any time the number one team in the country is in trouble, people are going to be watching their game, and they’re going to pull the other one up on the phone or the iPad and say, ‘Hold on, I gotta see this. Is Georgia going to lose?’
Hart’s being modest. It’s clearly because of his top-notch broadcast crew.
(See, I’m taking a page out of Kirby Smart’s book when he compliments the opponent. By downplaying the real reason the broadcast did so well, and instead accentuating the talents of my guest, it makes DawgsHQ look better, too.)
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Hart also thinks Georgia has some concerns moving forward on the football field
I’d be lying if I said this game didn’t include many red flags for Georgia’s football team.
The offensive line and Stetson Bennett‘s struggles, the ease with which Missouri rushed the passer, the explosive plays Georgia surrendered.
Hart leaves the game with come questions of his own.
“There’s a lot of question marks for Georgia after that one. The offensive line was a real issue. And Kirby said it at halftime. He told Cole, ‘We’re just getting our butts kicked up front.'”
It isn’t all doom and gloom, from Hart’s point of view.
“If there’s a positive to take out of it, in the fourth quarter when they needed a drive, and they went to a sugar huddle, and they ran to the line and they just knocked the snot out of Missouri up front, and they overtook the game, that’s a great sign,” Hart said.
“The question would be, from a pessimist, ‘Where was that in the first quarter?’ And I think that’s a fair question to ask.”
We also discussed this hilarious tweet:
The rest of our convo: College football’s biggest surprises thus far, and plenty to celebrate on the Braves baseball front
Tom hasn’t been to an Auburn game yet this season, but his evaluation of this week’s game is about what you would expect.
As we all know already, and as Hart added, the Bryan Harsin situation sets up as a tough omen for Auburn heading into a lethal primetime SEC road game.
I also asked Hart what he thinks the biggest surprises in the Southeastern Conference are to this point, and which storylines he’s watching.
It all came down to one SEC matchup this weekend:
How is Bryce Young‘s shoulder holding up? And will it fare better than Jimbo Fisher’s disaster of a season so far at Texas A&M?
For the Braves fans out there, we had to start the conversation talking about the Braves’ NL East title.
Hart spent a few years covering the Braves not too long ago on Fox Sports and SportsSouth, so I think you’ll appreciate his perspective on the champs.
