Georgia
Georgia players consider importance of securing College Football Playoff bye, extra rest
The Georgia Bulldogs played a pretty impressive regular season in the 2024 campaign, using a hard-hitting defense and their multiple offensive weapons to fuel them to a 11-2 overall record. The CFP selection committee thought highly of the 2024 SEC Champions and penciled them in with a No. 2 seed in the upcoming 12-team College Football Playoff.
And since they earned one of the top four overall seeds, the Bulldogs will get a bye during the first week, earning a week of extra rest, before facing off against their first opponent in the CFP Quarterfinals. On Sunday, Georgia players discussed the extra week of rest in the CFP.
“I think it’s great. We get a chance to continue to get better, recover, and take care of our bodies and stuff like that,” Daylon Everette said.
“Yeah, I think anybody at this point in the season could use some time off. And I think that’s huge just to get back and work on ourselves and try to get healthier,” Tate Ratledge explained.
Georgia has battled their way to 11-2 and the No. 2 overall seed in the 2024 College Football Playoffs. It certainly wasn’t handed to them. We got plenty of evidence of that in their past two games. The first of which was an absolute classic, a 44-42 victory over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in eight overtimes. It was without a doubt, one of the best games of the 2024 college football season.
Georgia trailed 17-0 at halftime, but managed to battle all the way back to tie it at the end of the second half. The Bulldogs outscored the Yellow Jackets 27-10 in the second half to force overtime. And from then on, it was an absolute marathon of a game in what will go down as one of the longest college football games of all-time. Georgia freshman running back Nate Frazier ran for a two-point conversion to win it.
And on Saturday night in the 2024 SEC Championship Game, the Bulldogs managed to pull off another thrilling win, a 22-19 win in overtime over Texas. Quarterback Carson Beck was knocked out of the game at the end of the first half, and didn’t return. Backup quarterback Gunner Stockton came in and completed 12 of 16 passes for 71 yards, while tossing in one interception.
The No. 2 seeded Georgia Bulldogs will await in the Quarterfinals of the CFP, where they will face off the winner of the Indiana and Notre Dame matchup in the first round.
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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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