Mailbag 7/13

lawtool1: Looking forward to Ole Miss game and The Grove; what is your favorite previous road game experience based on the opposing fans, location or outcome of the game?

Ben: I really have not been able to travel to a lot of road games, so my experiences here are pretty limited. The best road game I’ve been to was 2014 COFH. I sat in the corner of the stadium next to Georgia Tech’s band, and although I was surrounded by a lot of UGA fans, they were all pretty cordial throughout the game, which was nice to see. Another great experience was going to Charlotte for the ACC Championship Game that same season.

Jack: My first ever college football game I attended was Auburn-Clemson in 2011, the first loss for Auburn after winning the 2010 National Championship. As an Auburn fan at the time, I was crushed, but the Clemson fans were super kind and were understanding of the fact that it was going to be a little bit of a rough day for us with the season long win steak ending.

Logan: I’ve had a lot of fun road trips to UNC. They have a nice campus which makes it fun for tailgaters and for whatever reason we seem to win when I go to UNC home games against GT, but not when I go to Duke home games against GT... Overall though my favorite experiences have been in Tuscaloosa, the atmosphere there is on a different level for game day. Also, does our game in Ireland count, because that atmosphere was also great.

DressHerInWhiteAndGold: Non-CFB mid-summer sports highlights for you?

Ben: I don’t do it as much anymore, but I used to love watching the Home Run Derby.

Jack: Chris Eubanks! That was so fun to see him get past Tsitsipas and push Medvedev to five sets. The Braves quite literally every game are must watch for me as well. They play stupendous baseball.

Logan: Wimbledon was a great run while Eubanks was doing his thing. I hope to see more of that in the future. Generally speaking you can’t go wrong with the Braves, been catching a lot of them lately.

chilidogringsFO: If you had the power with no restrictions to come up with the “dream” schedule for GT for 2023, what would that be, and why for each opponent? (You also get to select home or away).

Would it be different for 2024 if the team shows improvement to bowl caliber over 2023?

Ben: I don’t know that I have a full 12-game schedule, but I’ll do this. Definite ACC opponents would be Virginia Tech, Duke, Wake Forest (just for the hell of it, really), and Florida State. For non-conference games, I like the idea of one FCS, two G5, and one P5 that isn’t UGA. I’m one of those guys who doesn’t think we need to play UGA every year. Personally, I would love to go explore some historic rivalries. Let’s go play Auburn again!

Jack: I’m the nerd that likes to see teams play others they’ve never played before. According to College Football-Reference, we’ve played 91 major programs. That doesn’t include schools like Washington, Washington State, Kansas State, UTEP, and others just to name a few. We can fill out a few schedules just by playing those teams for the first time.

Logan: Dream schedule is tough because depending on my goal I would set up the schedule them differently. Like am I trying to get all our rivals in our just set us up to win games? I’ll say, assuming I need conference games, I would include VT, Duke, UNC, BC, Clemson, Syracuse, Wake Forest, and FSU. Out of conference would be Auburn, Kennesaw State, Nebraska, and NorthWestern. I’m tired of us losing to the athens school every year, I could take a break for a bit. I think that generally sets up a good schedule with some challenges but gives us winnable games that wouldn’t be too boring to watch. Also there’s some potential vengeance games in there that I won’t get too much into.

TkTheGoat: Will the new College Football video game be a huge letdown or will it be the best in the game franchise?

Ben: It’s entirely possible that it could be both! I think people are going to set expectations very high and even though it might be the best game to come out to this point, people will still be disappointed.

Logan: Let down in what way? It’s absolutely gonna sell out and you are gonna play it for many many hours even if it is just a reskinned Madden clone. I hope they capture the atmosphere of the games, for me that would be the biggest question. One of my favorite things about the CFB video games was the fight songs, dumb commentary, and the weird pictures of the sideline and fans holding up signs (which I didn’t appreciate at the time but I kind of get a kick out of now). Not to mention the different stadiums. My guess is the new one will be average, but it’ll feel like the best one because we haven’t had anything else to compare against or play for nearly a decade.

DressHerInWhiteAndGold: Did I hear that we have a new GT Beat scribe at AJC ? Thoughts?

Jack: We do indeed! Friend of FTRS, Ken Sugiura, got promoted to general sports columnist at the AJC, which opened his GT beat role up. That has been taken by Chad Bishop, who used to cover Vanderbilt sports. We will be having Chad on the podcast in the next few weeks before the football season, so you’ll get a chance to hear about him there!

Submitted via email: Hey guys,

Hope everyone is doing well today. Question this week. I listened to a podcast recently discussing water polo and one of the topics which came up was that there are no real stadiums for water polo which makes holding events and competitions difficult. Most pools host water polo but are not set up exclusively for water polo training and competition seemed to be their point.

In relation to that, I guess my question is have you ever been to a sporting event like that where the setup felt more impromptu with no concessions and played on a field not set up for the sport and did that impact your perception of the event.

Weird one this week but it’s what I have. Thanks guys and have a good week.

-Ruby Gilman

Ben: I think the closest example I have to this isn’t even really a sport that I was actively watching, but instead just one that I saw in passing: intramural battleship. The premise is that you have several people in a canoe in a pool trying to upend it. It’s the strangest thing I think I’ve ever seen, but it seemed like people were having a lot of fun with it. It’s just strange that it was just in a random pool.

Logan: I felt like this when I used to watch people play “Quidditch” at the old burger bowl. Another one that I remember was going to one of the free form ice rinks in Marietta to watch our club team play hockey. It was a weird vibe since no one showed up and the rink wasn’t really set up for viewing hockey so even though we were right there near the ice it was a struggle to follow what was going on since you couldn’t really see where the puck was unless they were on the opposite side of the rink. It was cool though, its fun when there’s only a few fans there so it feels like your cheering means more.