With the 2026 college football season right around the corner, ESPN has taken a stab at identifying public enemy No. 1 for top college football teams.
The World Wide Leader broke down one “archenemy” for every power conference program. That includes Georgia, who had quite a few potential options to choose from.
ESPN’s Mark Schlabach selected former Florida and South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier, who was known for winning rivalry games and then letting the opposing team hear about it in the postgame press conference.
Here’s Schlabach’s analysis on Spurrier’s relationship to Georgia:
Nobody loved beating the Bulldogs — and then bragging about it — more than Spurrier, the former Florida and South Carolina coach. From 1990 to 2001, Spurrier flipped the script at the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, leading the Gators to an 11-1 record against their rivals. In 1995, when the game was played in Athens, Georgia, because of construction at the stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, the Gators became the first team to hang “half a hundred” on the Bulldogs at Sanford Stadium in a 52-17 victory. The next season, Spurrier handed Georgia the most lopsided loss in the series with a 47-7 rout. Then, as South Carolina’s coach from 2005 to 2015, Spurrier knocked off four ranked Georgia teams. He famously told reporters, “I sort of always liked playing them that second game because you could always count on them having two or three key players suspended.”
Indeed, Spurrier led Florida’s program during a time of pure dominance over the Bulldogs. From 1990-2010, Georgia won just 3 games in the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail rivalry. Spurrier was Florida’s head coach for the first 12 seasons of that run.
Georgia has since turned the tables in the rivalry, winning 8 of the last 9 meetings. This year’s game will take place in Atlanta due to stadium construction in Jacksonville.
Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.
