There’s nothing like a dog. To greet you when you walk in the door. To curl up in your lap on the couch. To make you feel good about yourself when the blues got you feeling down.
Do you have a dog? I have a dog. You know who else has a dog? Georgia football. The Bulldogs have their very own lapdog, and we don’t mean Uga with a Roman numeral.
Georgia has Auburn.
Nothing makes Georgia feel better than seeing Auburn at the door. Nothing makes Georgia look better than standing next to Auburn. No team has tamed and trained Auburn to roll over and play dead the way Georgia has over the last decade in particular.
Georgia has a leg up in the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry, and you know what happens when a Bulldog lifts his leg. That’s not rain on the Plains.
The numbers don’t lie. They mock. Georgia has won eight straight games in the series and nine of 10 since Kirby Smart took control of the leash in Athens. Their annual date has become a regular reminder that Auburn should’ve hired Smart off the Alabama staff when it had the chance.
The average score of Smart’s nine wins over Auburn: 28-11. Only once in those nine victories has Auburn scored as many as 20 points. Only once has Georgia scored fewer than 21.
The outlier was Auburn’s 40-17 temporary unmasking of No. 1 Georgia in 2017. That jubilation lasted all of three weeks. Smart and company took their revenge in the SEC Championship Game rematch.
Since Auburn last beat Georgia, the Tigers have beaten Alabama twice. They’ve beaten LSU in Baton Rouge. During the sad slog from Gus Malzahn to Bryan Harsin to Hugh Freeze, the worst period in modern Auburn history, they’ve taken down 10 SEC opponents all told at least once each.
Then there’s Georgia, the team that rubs their nose in it every year.
When next they step onto the same field, come Oct. 11th, the calendar counting the time between Auburn victories over Georgia will have reached 2,892 days. Or seven years, 11 months and one day.
So why should Auburn feel good about its chance to end that streak? On Wednesday, the SEC and ESPN released the kickoff times for Weeks 4-14 of the upcoming college football season. On Oct. 11, there is no specific time listed for Georgia at Auburn. There is only a word, and that word speaks volumes at a decibel level that’s only reachable at a certain time of day.
The word is “Night.”
Georgia at Auburn will be a night game. Not a game that starts with the sun up high and ends after sundown. A true night game. Kickoff will take place somewhere between 5 and 7 p.m. OK, so sunset in Auburn for Oct. 11, 2025, is listed at 6:13 p.m., which means the game could begin as the sun is starting to set, but you get the point.
For the first time since 2012, Georgia gets to experience the true meaning of Jordan-Hare After Dark. Ask Texas A&M what that means. Even during its woeful streak of four straight losing seasons from 2021-24, Auburn was 9-2 overall and 3-2 against SEC opponents in true night games on the Plains.
I know. Georgia isn’t Texas A&M. The Bulldogs are a completely different animal. Playing in the Loveliest Village at night didn’t bother Mark Richt’s 2012 Dogs – they romped 38-0 – but that team was headed toward a classic SEC Championship showdown with Alabama. Gene Chizik’s final Auburn team was in full freefall.
There’s still a large gap between the programs on paper, but this may be Auburn’s opportunity to narrow that distance and maybe erase it if only for a night. Two years ago, Georgia needed a late touchdown to escape Auburn with a 27-20 win. This Georgia team is not coming off back-to-back national titles. It will enter this season with more questions than it’s had in years.
Meanwhile, Auburn will kick off with more answers than it’s owned in a long time. It’s still a long way from here to the second Saturday in October, but the longer the Tigers have to wait to kick off in their den on any given Saturday, the better.
Jordan-Hare After Dark brings out the dog in them. Not the lapdog. The guard dog. Uga should expect a dog fight.
