Georgia
Kirby Smart and the Bulldogs Have Entered a New Era of Georgia Football
As the Bulldogs turn their attention to the 2025 college football season, the team will be entering a new era of Georgia football.
The Georgia Bulldogs 2024 college football season ended just over a week ago and the transfer portal entires, draft declarations, and coaching changes that subsequently follow the conclusion of a season have begun taking place. But as the post-mortem era of the Dawgs’ season brings changes throughout the building, Georgia football as a whole is undergoing a change as well.
This year’s senior class at the University of Georgia finished their careers as the winningest class in Bulldog history and were an integral part of the team’s two conference titles and back-to-back national championships that ushered in a new era of dominance that had never been seen by Georgia fans. But with the collegiate careers of the most successful Bulldog class ever now over, the Dawgs’ “renaissance era” of dominance has seemingly reached its conclusion as well.
A handful of the Bulldogs’ starters this season had playing experience in a national championship game. Names such as Malaki Starks, Carson Beck, Tate Ratledge, Mykel Williams, and others provided the team with real-game experience and a cultural understanding of what it took to win a national championship. But with the exception of a few returning seniors such as Oscar Delp and Dillon Bell, virtually none of Georgia’s starters in 2025 will have any experience in national championship games. Subsequently, the first-hand “championship experience” that is often required to win a national title within the roster has greatly been diminished.
As alarming as this news may be for Bulldog fans, it is certainly not the end of the world. After all, the Dawgs’ 2024 roster showcased numerous flashes of championship culture throughout the season. Flashes such as the team’s overtime win over Texas in the SEC Championship and an eight-overtime thriller against Georgia Tech at home prove that future rosters are more than capable of rebuilding the culture and habits that it takes to win the final game of the season.
The Georgia Bulldogs’ 2021 and 2022 rosters provided an incredible foundation for following teams to compete for national titles. But as members of those teams depart, conferences realign, and the College Football Playoff format changes, it is time to turn the page on Georgia’s “renaissance era” of dominance and usher in a new era of Georgia Football. An era that provides the team with a new championship culture and experiences that provide succeeding teams with the ability to continue the incredible legacy of the Georgia Bulldogs.
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Kirk Fordice-like Rick Jackson is sounding a whole lot like Daniel Kirkwood Fordice as he tries to be elected Georgia’s next governor.
Fordice came out of nowhere — actually, Vicksburg is somewhere but you know what I mean — in 1991 to become a two-term Mississippi governor.
He had money but nothing like Jackson, a billionaire businessman who’s also trying to emerge from nowhere politically to win Georgia’s top office.
“The establishment hated Trump, because they couldn’t control him. They are going to hate me,” Jackson says in an ad for Georgia’s Republican Primary on May 19, sounding like one of my favorite Mississippi governors — Fordice, because of his unpredictable personality (he could vilify or charm you, all in one sentence), not his politics. He died in 2004 of cancer.
I stood by a cafe entrance one morning, waiting to cover a Fordice speech. When he appeared, I stuck out my hand to shake his. “I’m not shaking your damn hand. You’re part of the problem down there (referring to the newspaper),” he told me, smiling and moving on.
Jackson rose to become one of economic giant-Georgia’s wealthiest people. He came from Atlanta’s rough midtown area, ending up in the foster care system. He left college due to poor financial circumstances.
The 71-year-old Jackson wormed his way into the dynamic city’s business scene in the late 1970s, mostly of the healthcare variety with mixed success before starting a workforce staffing and services company and later an antibiotics manufacturing plant. He turned those businesses into billion-dollar enterprises.
“It’s God’s money,” he said in rural Blakely, and he’s been charitable with it.
Jackson doesn’t try to hide his vast wealth. His family lives in a 48,000-square-foot mansion at Cumming, a place of nearly 100,000 people near Atlanta in Forsyth County, which once promoted its almost all-white population as a virtue.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Bill Torpy recently wrote that Jackson will spend a ton of his own money in seeking another mansion, the one occupied by Georgia’s governor. Torpy noted that present Lt. Gov. Burt Jones was once heavily favored to win the primary race, but he’s fallen behind Jackson’s bold money bid.
“The one-time front-runner in the Republican primary (Jones) has been relegated to No. 2, the result of a $100 million Mack truck running him over.
Rick Jackson, a billionaire healthcare tycoon, a man with a sly smile and reptilian gaze, is the guy driving that truck,” Torpy wrote.
The GOP field includes Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who spurned Trump’s demand to find 11,780 votes that would’ve allowed him to win Georgia in 2020.
Fordice was effective with some bombastic rhetoric during his run for governor, but I don’t remember it reaching the histrionic level employed by Jackson. In a major ad blitz, often referencing (Georgia college student) Laken Riley’s murderer, Jackson promises that unauthorized immigrants committing violent crimes will be “deported or departed … any questions?”
In another ad, Jackson growled, “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything, and like you, I’m sick of career politicians.”
Fordice spent only $1 million to get himself elected Mississippi’s governor. He somewhat sneaked up on the establishment, riding no escalator to the first floor of his Vicksburg concrete river mats-contracting office to declare his intentions. Who could ever forget his announcement seeking the governorship that ran on page 5 of the Clarion Ledger?
Recent polling ahead of Georgia’s May primaries for governor shows the eventual Republican nominee faces a strong Democrat in the November general election, most likely former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. That’ll require another whole pot of money.
— Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired Mississippi newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
Gulfstream recently announced a $5 million investment in Georgia education, welcoming students and leaders to its Savannah headquarters.
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