Georgia moving to the next level
This week’s Courier Herald column:
Dooley Field at Sanford Stadium had a bit of a coming out party Saturday night. A record capacity crowd greeted Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish and kept the stadium rocking until almost midnight. A national TV audience was able to witness Georgia grind out a victory. It was a great night to be a Bulldog.
I had the opportunity to try and explain college football over the weekend to someone who isn’t from this country. It was difficult to know where to begin, because it is an amateur sport that rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars. It is steeped in history but is ever changing. A bowl system that used to provide a few lucky players their first experience at travel has largely ceded its stature to over-saturation and relevance to a playoff system.
Georgia’s patron saint Lewis Grizzard once wrote a column explaining the intense rivalry of college football as “our way of life against theirs”. Whether one had ever stepped foot on campus didn’t matter. Our chosen university’s football team represented us – all that we believed in and all that we stood for. We didn’t want to lose to them, regardless who “they” were.
Some of “them”, however, needed to be beaten more than others. Fights among other SEC teams were heated rivalries. Being raised by a former Bulldog player, I was still taught that you pulled for SEC teams against others. They were, after all, family, and southerners don’t take kindly to outsiders who cause trouble for the family.
There were a few programs that had national stature, with Notre Dame chief among them. The had a national footprint that provided a recruiting base that transcended regional boundaries and a fan base that guaranteed ratings for any game they played.
Times have changed. The proliferation of televised games has removed much of the aura from the select few elite. The money from those television rights have allowed an arms race within college sports with many more schools now able to compete with the best. A recent ESPN article chronicled UGA’s “$200 Million quest to take down Alabama”.
Recruiting for all the major programs has been spread over a national footprint. Who each school views as their competition has largely changed.
There’s a clear parallel here between UGA’s football program and the state as a whole. In the half century since Vince Dooley began walking the sidelines of the field that now carries his name, Georgia has gone from a state that measured favorably against its southern neighbors to a national and international destination.
Our airport and ports are world class. Georgia basically invented the FinTech industry for payment processing, with the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange based here. 30 of the country’s Fortune 500 make their headquarters in the state, along with many North American Headquarters of international conglomerates.
The census taken before Vince Dooley’s arrival had Georgia as the 16th largest state in the country, just 15,000 people behind Wisconsin and almost 400,000 ahead of Tennessee and about 600,000 ahead of Alabama. Next year’s census will show Georgia as the 8th largest state in the country, and growth trends should have Georgia as the 5th largest about the time kids born today graduate college.
People and companies are voting with their feet, and they’re voting for the state of Georgia.
While our football team continues to target Alabama to declare supremacy, the state is no longer content with competing against Alabama, South Carolina, or Tennessee when it comes to economic development. It’s more frequent that our economic battles are with Texas, California, or other countries depending on the industry.
Like with football, this requires a different mindset. Georgia has to aim higher than “not bad for a southern state”. It’s now Georgia against the world.
For Georgia to win our battles at this level, it’s going to require us to understand who we’re really playing against. Once we understand the competition, we need to make sure we’re investing in the right places to win.
About Author
Charlie
Founder of GeorgiaPol.com; Now weekly columnist Very interested in Georgia and Georginas. Interest in politics is waning daily.
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Irony: Looking forward while supporting backward politicians that occasionally revert all the way back to Medieval. As to college football, I’ve had the same dilemma explaining it to former foreign colleagues. Basically, it is semi-pro athletics that is to higher education as a fish is to a bicycle.
I dug into the “our way of life against their’s” quote for a second, and saw a couple links- one to Red Clay Soul and one to a Tennessee fan mag. I dug in for a few just because of my dislike for the attitude behind the quote. The feelings behind the quote were variously attributed to the “ways of life” of UGA vs Tech, or alternatively or also between North v South as embedded in UGA vs Notre Dame, or perhaps even religious differences.
I get the rivalry, but my feeling is that that attitude about conflicts between ways of life should be at its own life’s end.
It’s that kind of attitude that makes people cheer when someone on the “them” team gets injured. Bad for them? Must then be good for you.
Nah, that’s bad on you, and also bad for the game. And that kind of “sportsmanship” means “us” is more likely to get injured too.
Clearly pushing the analogy, as stated by the “we’re all on the same Georgia team” attitude, UGA and Tech and State and KSU and Southern and Augusta and so many national and international universities now complement and collaborate with each other in academic and other ways. From there to econ development, it doesn’t take more than a step to say that while we do compete, we’re also all Georgians, and Americans, and frankly, all human.
I guess the implication is that even when competing, we don’t throw our constituents- or our neighbors- under the bus in order to win.
Call me a PollyAnna, but I believe football, and economic development, can both be won with grace and sportsmanship, and avoidance (minimization) of infliction of injury. In the analogy. injury would mean activities like poaching corporations to relocate, or forcing GA taxpayers to shoulder the tax burden that should more appropriately be paid by the “incentivized” corporation.
And when its GA or the USA vs the world, the analogy makes it all that much more obvious that we should be following the rules of the game- even if it’s the WTO rules. Rulemaking and referees (and video or court review), is the way to a fair game, not unilateral imposition of injury (say by tariffs?).
I’m still not sure why there has never been a national law preventing the race to the bottom in state economic development incentives. It seems literally spelled out in the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
‘Nuff from me. I am clearly no expert in football.
When it’s a race to the bottom, getting there first makes a winner. Why pay for education when you can import it cheaper?