The famous Carthaginian general Hannibal is, to this day, revered as one of the greatest tacticians in military history. Students at war colleges all over the world still study his innovations on the battlefield.
Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, was a similarly gifted tactician who nevertheless didn’t achieve as much as his son would. (The city of Barcelona is named in tribute to him after Barca, his nickname, which meant “lightning bolt” in recognition of his swiftness in battle.) But Hamilcar so hated the Romans that he made his son swear an oath that he would be a perpetual enemy of Rome.
In one of the most famous setpieces in all of history, Hannibal fulfilled his oath by crossing the Alps to invade italy with 37 war elephants as a part of his army. Even today, driving through the Alps isn’t exactly a picnic, so you can imagine how badly he wanted to honor his promise if he tried to move 37 damn elephants through a mountain range.
After invading Italy, Hannibal delivered three devastating blows to the Romans. He trapped the legions in the Battle of Trebia, ambushed and crushed them at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and annihilated an entire army at the Battle of Cannae. Hannibal reduced the Roman army, which the citizens it guarded believed to be invincible in combat, to a smoldering ruin. Panic gripped the streets of Rome, the closest the city would come to total military defeat for nearly 600 years.
Facing Unpleasant Facts
This Saturday, the University of Georgia Bulldogs will play a home game at Sanford Stadium. The team hasn’t lost a game at home this decade. As of today, it’s been 2,174 days since Georgia last lost at home, which will make it 2,177 at kick. For comparison, World War II lasted 2.,194 days. Georgia has defended its home turf for just under three weeks shy of the time it took to fight the biggest conflict in world history to date.
Don’t just take my word for it: Jaxson Dart said Sanford was the most electric atmosphere he ever experienced ($$). Sanford Stadium has become a raucous, wild environment where winning is very, very difficult if you’re not the home team. I always expect Georgia to win, doubly so when we’re at home. So why am I filled with anxiety about this particular game?
Brace yourself because this first part is going to sting a bit.
Athens was buzzing on September 27, 2008, when Alabama came to town for a nighttime kickoff. Gameday was in town, and the blackout was on. I was living in New York at the time, and I watched Georgia games at St. Mark’s Alehouse in the East Village. I ended up leaving at the half to go to an apartment party. Alabama won 41-30.
On November 24, 2012, the shadows lengthened in the late fall afternoon. I was standing in a parking lot in Athens next to a giant, steaming cauldron that would soon provide the best Brunswick stew I’ve ever eaten. Fresh off a 42-10 dusting of Tech, I predicted that Georgia would beat Alabama the next weekend to win the SEC and face Notre Dame in the national championship. A week later, as Chris Conley caught a deflected pass from Aaron Murray and time expired, I screamed so loud and with such anguish in my graduate school office that somebody came down the hall to make sure I was okay. Alabama won 32-28.
Just under three years later, on October 3, 2015, a steady rain fell on me and the rest of the crowd in Sanford Stadium. I had invited my friend Andrew, the commissioner of my fantasy league, to town for the game. Georgia was a field goal favorite, the first time Alabama had been an underdog in seven years. Georgia entered undefeated with national championship ambitions and a Heisman candidate in Nick Chubb. After a tense first quarter, the dam broke, and Alabama scored 21 in the second. When Brice Ramsey threw an interception on a clearly jumped route to put the Tide up 31-3, we gave up and left. Sodden and miserable, we made it to Buddha Bar in time to see Chubb break off a long run for Georgia’s lone touchdown of the day. The Mark Richt era was all but over. Alabama won 38-10.
On January 8, 2018, I was sitting in the end zone in the Mercedes-Benz Dome and was perfectly positioned to see Devonta Smith slip past the coverage to score the game-winning touchdown. My phone died, and I had to walk away from the stadium until I could find a cab. I didn’t get home until 4 am. Alabama won 26-23. Less than a year later, on December 1, I watched from my in-laws’ house as Georgia raced out to a lead over what was supposed to be an invincible Alabama team before losing another heartbreaker in the same building, 35-28. You probably know the scores, but I’ll repeat them anyway: 41-24, 41-24, 27-24, 41-34.
Alabama has found myriad ways to beat Georgia over the last two decades: come-from-behind heartbreakers, neck-and-neck nailbiters, full-on blowouts. Since Nick Saban arrived at Alabama and turned it into the yardstick for every college football program’s dynastic ambitions, Georgia has beaten the Tide twice. One of those was an overtime thriller in Tuscaloosa during Saban’s first year. The other one, of course, ended the Dawgs’ 41-year championship drought.
During Kirby Smart’s tenure, the Dawgs have enjoyed a run of success that any other team in the country would love to experience: a 108-19 record, wins in the Rose, Sugar, Peach Bowl, and Orange Bowls, three conference titles, and two national titles. Winning records against all our rivals. No longer is Halloween weekend a pressure-packed, white-knuckle affair sweating out the Florida game. We he longest winning streak in the history of the SEC.
Nobody wants to hear us complain about this, but the fly in the chardonnay of our success has been an inability to beat Alabama. That winning streak I mentioned? Snapped by a loss to Alabama. The regular season win streak? Also put to an end by Alabama. Smart’s teams are 1-5 against the Tide.
What ’Bama Means
I can’t speak for every Georgia fan, but the Alabama Crimson Tide own a timeshare in the portion of my brain devoted to football. (Don’t worry, I gouge them on the HOA fees.) Why? Why is it that they still loom so large? The answer is narrative.
For nearly 20 years now, Alabama has been the gold standard and the team against which teams, and particularly Georgia, has measured themselves. Schools have hired a busload of former Saban assistants hoping to catch some of the magic that turned Tuscaloosa into college football El Dorado. Because they’ve lost so infrequently, beating Alabama holds an outsized symbolic importance in football fans’ collective imagination. Just think about all the ink that accompanies a Tide loss, up to and including the egg they laid against Florida State a few weeks ago. Every article breathlessly speculating on whether an individual loss, whether a regular season slip-up against Texas A&M or a blowout in the postseason, meant the dynasty was over.
That Kirby Smart has turned out to be the only Saban assistant capable of implementing an Alabama-esque culture and delivering titles to a starved and grateful fanbase has only exacerbated the angst. Yes, we’ve experienced the absolute highest heights a fanbase can know, but Alabama still has our number. Even last year, with Saban taking his alarmingly orange-ish hair to television, the Elephants still figured out a way to get the better of the Dawgs again.
We enter this Saturday’s game 3-0, well-positioned to make another run at an SEC title and the playoffs. Alabama already has a loss and hasn’t shown its customary inevitability. We’re riding a 33-game home winning streak in Sanford that dates back to October 2019. It will be a raucous, explosive nighttime environment. And even if we lose, all our goals are still in front of us. We won the league even after laying that egg in Tuscaloosa last year, after all.
But the narrative value of beating the Crimson Tide is impossible to overstate. A win helps to preserve Sanford’s reputation for being a tough place to play. But it also helps to exorcise the demons of blown leads, flat starts, and frustration that has hung around like a single dark cloud in an otherwise blue sky.
Saturday’s game is just one game out of many we hope to play this season. But from a narrative standpoint, it might be the biggest one.
How to Beat an Elephant
After winning his three major victories, Hannibal spent more than a decade marauding through Italy and the rest of the Roman world. He eventually met his match, however, in the form of a young, Roman general named Publius Cornelius Scipio, near a town called Zama in present-day Tunisia.
The war elephants were a huge part of Hannibal’s plan, giving his army an incredible psychological advantage over the Romans. After all, can you imagine standing still with just a sword or javelin in your hand with a mad as hell elephant charging you?
Scipio finally figured out a way to negate the mental edge that the elephants gave the Carthaginians. He defied conventional military wisdom by positioning his infantry with wide lanes between the formations instead of close together. This allowed the men to open up lanes through which the elephants could pass instead of being trampled. Also, when the elephants charged, he had his men blast their war trumpets and bang on their shields, panicking some of the animals and sending them charging back through the Carthaginian lines. Neutralizing the elephants’ advantage allowed Scipio to rout Hannibal’s army, ending the war.
The lesson is that, to beat an elephant, you can’t let it intimidate you.
