Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you an alternate history of Georgia football from nearly a decade ago, to see how one simple play could have changed the way we know Georgia football today.
Let's go back to the night of November 25, 2007.
Running back Thomas Brown and quarterback Matt Stafford were leading the Bulldogs to a 31-17 win over Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
That game, while close through the first half, wasn't in doubt in the fourth quarter, as red-hot Georgia notched its sixth straight victory to close out the regular season.
No, this revised version of history doesn't change in Atlanta. It changes 296 miles away in Lexington, Kentucky, where Tennessee and Kentucky were duking out a game that eventually went to four overtimes, with the win sending the Volunteers — which beat the Bulldogs 35-14 earlier that season — to the SEC Championship against LSU.
In the second overtime period (still writing about actual history here), Kentucky's Sam Maxwell stepped in front of a pass from Tennessee's Erik Ainge, giving the Wildcats the ball and a chance to win the game.
Three straight runs by running back Rafael Little put the ball at the Vols 17, setting up kicker Lones Seiber from 34 yards away.
Tennessee called a timeout to "ice" Seiber.
One play later, his kick was blocked, sending the game into a third overtime, and eventually a fourth, where the Vols hung on, 52-50 by stopping Kentucky quarterback Andre Woodson's desperate scramble on a two-point conversion attempt.
But what if that fateful kick in the second extra frame wasn't blocked, and Seiber's kick was good?
Kentucky wins.
Georgia goes the SEC Championship.
The smokin' hot Bulldogs, led by Stafford, Brown, Knowshon Moreno, Mohammed Massaquoi, Sean Bailey and Marcus Howard, take down LSU in the Georgia Dome.
Thanks to a series of fortunate events around the the country (These ones actually happened): Oklahoma knocking off No. 2 Missouri in the Big 12 Championship (Yes, you read that correctly) and Pittsburgh knocking off No. 3 West Virginia (That's correct, too), Georgia ascends to No. 2 in the BCS standings to play No. 1 Ohio State in the BCS Championship Game.
The Bayou Bengals, who also had two losses in 2007, had no problems dispatching the Buckeyes in New Orleans. The Bulldogs, who destroyed Hawaii 41-10 in the Sugar Bowl, wouldn't have much trouble either.
Despite a blowout loss to Tennessee and a home loss to South Carolina, Georgia would claim a national championship, its first since 1980, on the same field where Herschel and Co. beat Notre Dame 17-10.
Here's where it gets interesting.
Thanks to that 2007 championship ring, Richt is able to lure Kirby Smart to Athens as his defensive coordinator in 2010, instead of Todd Grantham, to replace Willie Martinez. Remember, credible reporters said at the time that Smart did everything but sign the dotted line before he decided to stay with Nick Saban at Alabama. In this case, Smart believes in the Georgia prorgam, and opts to come home in a "lateral" move.
He helps right the ship that started to sink circa 2009.
With Smart coaching the defense and Mike Bobo getting the offense in gear with Aaron Murray, the 2012 Bulldogs take down Alabama in the SEC Championship, then destroy Notre Dame in the BCS Championship.
Two national titles.
After the 2012 title, both Bobo and Smart leave for head coaching gigs. Bobo leaves to take over at Arkansas State, vacated by Hugh Freeze, who starts up at Ole Miss. Smart stays in the south to coach North Carolina, which hires him over Larry Fedora, on the hope that Smart brings his relentless recruiting prowess to Chapel Hill to revive one of the perennial "sleeping giant" programs.
Richt is forced to hire two new coordinators in the same off-season.
He re-hires Neil Callaway, who was just fired at UAB, to run the offense, and plucks an up-and-coming Jeremy Pruitt, then the secondary coach at Alabama, to be his defensive coordinator.
The offense dips as Callaway tries to fit square pegs into round holes, but the defense maintains a dominant pace.
No more titles pop up, but Georgia continues to win nine or 10 games per year. The fans, spoiled by a pair of national titles, start get restless, wondering if Richt has hit a plateau.
We get through 2016 without another SEC title (though the 2014 Bulldogs win the SEC East, but fall to the Crimson Tide in the SEC Championship), but the restlessness persists.
Talk of replacing Richt has started entering the 2017 season, though fans remind themselves how much he's accomplished in his time here, compared to the previous 30 years in Athens. He's revered in the same way Florida State fans talked about his mentor, Bobby Bowden.
In this revised history, we're going into this season wondering if the market has turned on Georgia, or if it was just a momentary dip before ascending back to the heights of title contenders. The promise of Jacob Eason and Nick Chubb leads us to believe it's the latter.
But, as we know, it didn't happen this way.
The kick was blocked.
