Many of you nailed it, again. While prior WABAC games featured a Georgia win, this was one that lives in my head as an all-time disappointment game, as it was my first WLOCP game that I attended in person, as a Redcoat.

I’ve alluded to my Redcoat experience before, but this was a doozy of a game. We had only been on one road trip as a complete unit, and my freshman season in the band was a letdown from the fan perspective. Our opener saw us lose to an unranked South Carolina team in the blazing 12:30 afternoon heat, which was a weird way to open the year from both a football perspective and a band perspective. Our section leader (tenor saxophones, the redheaded stepchildren of the band) had just the year prior passed out on national TV, falling forward into his instrument and effectively knocking his top front teeth completely out, which was caught on camera briefly in the away tilt in Columbia. We spent much of the game literally feeding him water and thought we’d have to put him on an IV bag, sweating our asses off in wool uniforms while the Dawgs lost a 2 point game to the Cocks and let the air out of the bag of what was high optimism coming off the 1992 campaign. Our lone away game was to Tennessee, an evening game on an absolutely beautiful day in Knoxville, though we were clobbered 38-6 by the end.

In other words, we hadn’t been anywhere much , and after already losing four games, the only thing exciting about this trip was it was the first game for me in Jacksonville; but the Spurrier era team and the impending monsoon to be wasn’t anything to look forward to. What ensued was an exciting game to watch, but one that I can’t scrub from my memory, no matter how long it’s been since and no matter what we’ve done with Florida in recent years, either. On to the observations:

• :23 – yes, the rain was that bad. I recall walking up stairs into a waterfall and my feet being immediately soaked the entire game.
• 1:00 – Wuerffel to Doering. Believe it or not Wuerfel would be pulled from this game.
• 1:45 – If you’d told someone we had a team with Eric Zeier, Brice Hunter, and Terrell Davis in the same backfield and didn’t finish bowl eligible, they’d think you were joking. Ray Goff was just that bad.
• 2:00 – first fumble on a punt. There will be more.
• 2:31 – Zeier throws and interception. That happens sometimes when you throw the ball 65 times in a game.
• 2:45 – Another Florida fumble.
• 3:00 – Completion to TE Shannon Mitchell. Mitchell is about to have a Brock Bowers like game.
• 3:15 – Frank Harvey, fullback. Remember fullbacks? Also, Kanon Parkman did a great job kicking given the conditions in this game.
• 3:30 – Eric Rhett’s first touchdown, who is about to have a game and a half as the fun-and-gun didn’t really have the opportunity to be so fun in these conditions.
• 4:00 – Zeier fumble on the exchange. We’re just trading turnovers at this point.
• 4:45 – Hasan Graham completion (haven’t heard that name in a while) followed by Mitchell hurdling a guy like Darnell Washington.
• 5:10 – Brice Hunter touchdown
• 5:20 – Mitch Davis intercepts Wuerffel.
• 5:45 – The shovel pass was working, Shannon Mitchell worked harder
• 6:40 – Zeier using his legs to get yards. I loved Zeier in the day, and watching this game reminds me of his mechanics in throwing the ball as well as his tenacity as a competitor. His height aside, he had one of the prettiest passes of any Dawg QB, and it had some zip to it. I still have a soft spot in my chest where I wasn’t paying attention standing on the sidelines before halftime and catching an errant pass of his square in the breastplate. Boy, that one hurt.
• 7:00 – Somewhere around here, Terry Dean was brought into the game to replace Wuerffel. I had totally forgotten that they switched QBs in this game.
• 8:00 – Mitch Davis sack. The fact I can’t remember many other defensive players from this era of Georgia football outside of Davis probably says enough. If you look closely, you can see #47 out there, as Robert Edwards was playing DB in this game, along with Will Muschamp (#30, I believe).
• 10:15 – Incomplete fade pass, and you can see Uga trying to attack a Gator. This was Uga V, from the famed image of Uga trying to bite Robert Baker in the 1996 Auburn game. God bless him, the little guy really, really hated orange, didn’t he?

• You’ll notice a healthy dose of running from the Gators for the rest of this game. Pretty much you could feel Spurrier was just going to be happy getting out with a win, so I thought we were cooked and they were going to run out the clock.
• At 13:08 begins what I remember to be as exciting of a high as you could get for the season. Starting with a completion to Mitchell, followed by a completion to Hunter.
• 13:25 – another shovel pass to Mitchell, followed by a completion to Mitchell right after.
• 13:50 – an amazing completion down the middle with seconds trickling off the clock.
• 14:00 – Absolute bedlam starts. A completion down the middle to Jerry Jerman and we collectively lost our sh*t. We were going completely bonkers and I couldn’t even tell you if I noticed the timeout or not. It happened right in front of where we were stationed, and the timeout would’ve been called right in from of our faces by Lott, but we never saw it.
• 14:20 – Zeier gets another shot, a fade attempt that gets a PI call. Georgia gets the ball at the 2.5.
• 14:40 – Incomplete pass, Spurrier prays, and I still remember seeing Zeier on his knees in the middle of the field at the end. To this day, the sound and feeling from that moment drives my deep and passionate hatred of all things Florida.

Georgia would finish 5-6, so my first year in the Redcoats meant no bowl trip, lots of sweat, and heaping amounts of disappointment. The end of the game made a column by Mark Schlabach about the greatest plays that never counted, which you can read here. A quote there, from Zeier:

“It obviously stays at the forefront of every conversation I have about Georgia football,” said Zeier, now a mortgage banker with Bank of America in Atlanta. “It’s the question that always gets asked: ‘Did you think it was a timeout?'”

Seventeen years later, Zeier has finally accepted the fact that Lott called timeout before the snap.

“I think it was,” Zeier said. “If you go back and watch the film, he called timeout a split second before the ball was snapped. On the field, the whistle was blown and it sounded like it came after the snap. But it was a timeout. Of course, when I’m talking to a Bulldog fan, the timeout came after the snap.”

Yeah, it was. It also sucked, and is why I’ll gladly recite “FTMFs”, time and time again.