The Dawgs Simply Refuse To Dog It

It long has been a college football dictum that teams which challenge for a major conference championship shall be long on experience, big in size, loaded in talent, deep in reserves, and as obviously so as a blocked punt. So let us examine the Georgia Bulldogs, who lead the Southeastern Conference with a 4-0 record. Certainly Alabama, the Bulldogs' closest rival with a 3-0 conference record, fits all the qualifications, but the green, lean, none-too-star-studded Bulldogs are one of the most intriguing surprises of the 1978 season.

As of last Saturday night in Lexington, when Georgia overcame a 16-point deficit to beat Kentucky 17-16 on a field goal that was its last offensive play of the game, the 16th-ranked Bulldogs had a 6-1 record and had knocked off four straight SEC opponents by a combined score of 114-46. With that, alumni began inquiring about hotel rooms for the Sugar Bowl, and T shirts emblazoned with HOW ABOUT THEM DAWGS? were the hot item on the Athens campus.

All this from a team whose roster includes but 11 seniors, a club whose coach, Vince Dooley, admits, "It's not a great team, we don't have enough really good players," and one whose quarterback says, "If we don't play well, we can get beat by anyone on our schedule. We just don't have the natural ability and we're not going to outclass a lot of people on sheer talent."

What Georgia does have is character, a running back named Willie McClendon and a knack for playing near errorless football. The Bulldogs also are blessed with the kind of unity other teams only read about and a winning attitude that owes a large measure of thanks to the media.

For along with their vanquished opposition, the Bulldogs have embarrassed a host of football writers, nearly all of whom predicted the kind of season Georgians experienced when General Sherman was messing up their magnolias. In 1977 Georgia's record was 5-6 as the team committed a school-record 57 fumbles. Moreover, Georgia had lost 20 lettermen and had 36 sophomores and freshmen on its roster. Only three starters were returning to the "Junkyard Dogs" defense that had taken Georgia to the Sugar Bowl at the end of the 1976 season.

"If Dooley can produce a winner this year," one preview ran, "he's truly a magician. Four victories look like the maximum, and the Vandy game could very well decide who dwells in the SEC cellar this year." Dooley, who is in his 15th year as Georgia coach, didn't expect much more himself. "I thought we would do well if we had a winning season," he says.

When the Bulldogs read of their impending wretchedness, however, they did a slow burn that may fire them all the way back to the Sugar Bowl. "Those stories just got everybody a little hacked off," says Quarterback Jeff Pyburn, whose father Jim coaches the defensive ends and linebackers. "I don't think anyone took into account that we had a lot of guys on this team who wanted to fight. That's brought us a long way."

Indeed, of the factors accounting for the Bulldogs' success, internal competition probably is the primary one. Spring practice was one of the most competitive in Dooley's memory, and the fight for starting positions intensified when freshmen, like Split End Lindsay Scott and Defensive Guard Jimmy Payne, joined the team in the fall.

The freshmen have done more than spur the veteran Bulldogs to greater effort. Scott, a 17-year-old public relations major, is the team's leading pass receiver and a special teams player whose 99-yard kickoff return against LSU sparked Georgia to a 24-17 win at Baton Rouge. Payne leads the Bulldogs in sacks.

The Bulldog offense also has performed with more effectiveness this season as the result of a change from the veer to the I. Including the Kentucky game—in which the Bulldogs didn't suffer a single turnover and weren't penalized a single yard—Georgia has fumbled only 18 times. Pyburn, who seems to hoard his good passes until third down, has thrown but one interception. Mike Garrett's 40.1-yard punting average also has eased the defensive burden, while Rex Robinson, the sophomore who booted the game-winning field goal against Kentucky with only three seconds left on the Commonwealth Stadium clock, has been nearly perfect from placement, having connected on nine of 11 field-goal attempts and 17 of 17 PATs.