ATHENS — The 2022 basketball version of “Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate” between Georgia and Georgia Tech will take place on Tuesday, Dec. 6 in Atlanta.
The Bulldogs and Yellow Jackets will meet at McCamish Pavilion for the first time since 2018. Georgia has won each of the past two meetings in Atlanta. The Bulldogs earned a 60-43 win on Dec. 20, 2016 and secured a 70-59 on Dec. 22, 2018. The matchup in 2020 was cancelled when a date for the game could not be found during the COVID-shortened campaign. That represented the first time since the 1923-24 season that the intrastate rivals did not meet on the hardwood.
Georgia Tech won the most recent matchup last season in Athens, snapping a five-game winning streak for the Bulldogs. Georgia’s quintet of successive victories matched its second-longest stretch of success ever against the Yellow Jackets. The Bulldogs won seven straight meetings between 1908-21 and also captured five consecutive W’s between 1929-31 and 1939-41.
This year’s contest will be Georgia’s first under head coach Mike White, who averaged more than 22 wins per year in combined 11 seasons as head coach at Louisiana Tech (2012-15) and Florida (2015-22) before coming to Athens in March. White led the Bulldogs and Gators to postseason competition during nine of 10 possible seasons, and Florida was a consensus pick to earn a bid to the 2020 NCAA Tournament before it was canceled.
White and his staff of associate head coach Antonio Reynolds Dean and assistant coaches Erik Pastrana and Akeem Miskdeen have reshaped the Bulldogs’ roster over the past three months, and five returning letterwinners will be joined by seven scholarship newcomers.
Georgia’s returning players include Jabri Abdur-Rahim, Braelen Bridges, Jaxon Etter, Jailyn Ingram and Kario Oquendo. Oquendo is the SEC’s top returning scorer in league games after averaging 18.3 ppg against conference competition last season. Bridges became the first Bulldog in more than 40 years to lead the SEC in field goal percentage, and his 63.4 percent effort also ranks second all-time in Georgia history.
The newcomers include fifth-year Mardrez McBride, senior Terry Roberts, juniors Frank Anselem, Justin Hill and Matthew-Alexander Moncrieffe, sophomore Jusaun Holt and freshman KyeRon Lindsay. Five of the transfers – Anselem, Hill, Holt, McBride and Moncrieffe – played on teams that reached the NCAA Tournament in either 2021 or 2022 and the sixth – Roberts – helped lead Florida SouthWestern to a No. 1 ranking in junior college during 2020. Lindsay played for two top-10 ranked teams in Texas Class 6A at Denton Guyer High School.
