#ItMightMeanTooMuch: A Georgia-Tennessee family debate that beckons a fascinating question
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It’s talkin’ season, and nobody is thinking about losing. I get that. Everybody is improved and ready to go undefeated.
But as we head into the home stretch before the start of the season, there’s an #ItMightMeanTooMuch subject that got me thinking about an age-old question — what’s the best way to lose?
The example emailed to me by Kyle Matlock (you might recognize that name from the time he claimed he got fired for being a Tennessee fan in his Memphis-based job) is the perfect example of tackling that issue.
As the story goes, Tennessee fan Kyle and his Georgia fan friend (also his stepdad) were texting back and forth throughout the game when the teams met in 2016. To be clear, they’re tight. Kyle later added in the story that he was the best man in his stepdad’s wedding.
In the last minute of the game, they both elected not to text each other anymore. They wanted to be consumed by the final minute of a thrilling, down-to-the-wire game. Even they couldn’t have predicted how thrilling and down-to-the-wire it was going to be.
Tennessee and Georgia fans probably remember this walk-off Hail Mary like it was yesterday:
Underrated part of that? Butch Jones being so overcome with emotion that instead of jumping into the postgame mosh pit, he breaks down and starts sobbing.
Back to the story.
Kyle, the Tennessee fan, decides to break the silence. He tries to call his stepdad (the Georgia fan) because he was “simply impressed with how insane the game was.”
Listen. I appreciate Kyle and believe him when he said he wanted to call to talk to his stepdad, but at that moment? You let it breathe. You can’t be the first one to call. You just can’t.
Needless to say, the stepdad didn’t answer the phone when Kyle called … for the next week.
When the stepdad did finally answer — Kyle’s mom had to convince him of that — the first thing he said spoke to how frustrating it was to lose via a Hail Mary.
“I’d rather lose 42 to nothin’, than lose like that,” the stepdad said.
Interesting choice of words.
A year later, Georgia went into Tennessee and delivered a 41-0 blowout to silence the Knoxville crowd.
“As I was downing my jar of moonshine watching the clock strike zero with the score at … 41 to nothin’, I called (my stepdad) and declared how much I disagreed with him,” Kyle said.
Kyle might have a point here. You see, 2 weeks before he watched his Vols get torched by Georgia, he experienced what it was like to be on the other side of a walk-off Hail Mary. Feleipe Franks handed Kyle a different kind of heartbreak:
That beckons the question — which is the better way to lose?
I think that question differs depending on who you ask. I also think it depends on the situation.
I agree with the stepdad that I’d rather lose 42-0 than watch my team allow a go-ahead touchdown on a Hail Mary at the buzzer. That’s brutal. It’s a bit easier to accept a Hail Mary loss when your team is tied like Tennessee and Florida were in 2017 when Franks unloaded the throw of his life.
The blowout losses don’t eat at you over time the same way the nail-biters do. Do you think Notre Dame fans are sick to their stomach about the 2012 BCS National Championship? No. They shouldn’t be. They got smoked by the better team (Alabama) and they went as far as they could.
In 5 years, I bet Alabama fans will have more angst about losing the 2016 title game to Clemson on the late score by Hunter Renfrow than they will about getting demolished by Clemson in the 2018 title game.
But here’s what I’ll say about Kyle’s point because I think it’s a fair one. He couldn’t handle Tennessee getting blown out by Georgia in 2017. A 41-0 loss in the middle of a college football season is often a sign that your team isn’t even close to contention. That’s such a tough pill to swallow. Watching a divisional team come into your building and stomp all over you makes you rethink everything.
In hindsight, Tennessee fans probably shouldn’t known that it was going to get ugly in 2017. They didn’t need a Georgia blowout for that reality to sink in. But once it does? It’s helpless. At least when you lose on a Hail Mary, you feel like things can go your way next time. Just being in that position shows that the opportunity was there.
And I realize in the heat of the moment of either type of loss, the other way to suffer a defeat sounds painless. Maybe that’s part of it.
Or maybe there’s just no easy way to lose, and as long as the scoreboard doesn’t show what we want at game’s end, we’ll go a week without talking to our stepsons.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
