Georgia has lacked a traditional rivalry with LSU - that annual gift was bestowed to Florida to preserve the Bulldogs' "Oldest Rivalry In The South" business with Auburn, presumably to preserve parking lot fistfights across all the Columbus, Ga., Stuckey's locations. With only a week until their meeting in Atlanta, the gang at And The Valley Shook are trying their best to indoctrinate Bulldog fans into the schizoid world of the Tigers' brand of "passive / agressive / here, eat this / agressive" hospitality. Case in point:
Happy Tigers: Our friend Poseur showers UGA with good tidings, and even points out a bizarre symmetry between the two schools' recent success - when one program's good, so is the other, etc. - and even goes so far as to laud the Athens music scene with a Drive By Truckers shout-out (flattery gets you everywhere with an audiophile in the Peach State, Cajuns...):
So I welcome the Dawgs. Playing UGA in the SEC title game means we are both ascendant again, and that's good news round these parts. In the SEC wars, UGA is not exactly an ally, but they aren't an enemy either.
Forget Hate Week. Let's party.
Insane, Evil Tigers: For a fan base sitting squat upon a native soil so famously ravaged by the crippling combination of natural disasters and economic corruption, you'd think that LSU wouldn't find it prudent to remind everyone that their very first Chancellor (then called a "superintendent' at Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy) in 1859, two years before the American Civil War that would end shortly after Sherman and his Union troops burned down most of Atlanta and the state of Georgia.
Before you respond with politically shaped retorts or reprimands, remember two things: This is SEC football, and no cause is lost if it can be applied to stoking animosity between two football teams, and if a state full of football fans both pro and collegiate can reinvent butthurt when accosted by those who would mention hurricanes and such things, it's more than fitting fair Georgia can howl with a little outrage, too. SO HOW DARE YOU AND WHATSUCH, THAT CIVIL WAR WAS JUST 150 YEEERZ AGO!
Oh, false outrage and manufactured provincialism, you make it great to be a college football fan!