It’s been 50 years, and legendary Georgia coach Vince Dooley still says he hasn’t seen a celebration quite like it.
On Oct. 2, 1965, Dooley took the No. 10 Bulldogs up to the Big House to face No. 7 Michigan two weeks after beating No. 5 Alabama. A crowd of 43,000 Big Ten fans welcomed Georgia, which Dooley called an “eye-opener” for the players. The Bulldogs won 15-7, and Dooley would get his “eye-opener” a few hours later.
Thousands of Georgia fans streamed to the Athens airport, which led to a five-mile traffic jam. Dooley said people left their cars parked on the highway and ran to the airport. Dooley recalls receiving “hundreds of telegrams from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama” over the next few weeks.
“It was a funny reaction at the time,” Dooley told Sporting News. “At that particular time it was seen as a Southern victory to go up North and beat Michigan.”
If anybody can relate, it’s Ohio State tailback Ezekiel Elliott.
He put the signature on the second College Football Playoff semifinal against Alabama with a run now known as “85 Yards Through the Heart of the South.” That moment now has its own T-shirt. Elliott’s Twitter account is another constant reminder. How many times a day does somebody point it out? Elliott simply lets out an, “Oh, man.”
“That’s just gonna be an iconic run in Ohio State history,” Elliott said. “It’s every day on Twitter somebody’s tweeting it at me multiple times. You hear about it all the time. That’s just a play that means a lot to Buckeye Nation, and it’s something important to them.”
Two moments, 50 years apart, celebrated in telegrams and tweets, set up the next chapter between two conferences pulling in record-breaking revenues heading into 2015. The SEC and Big Ten both distributed more than $30 million to their member schools in 2014. It’s more than money.
New York Times bestselling author John U. Bacon, whose book “Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football” arrives Sept. 1, said that same passion runs just as deep in Big Ten country.
“There’s no question when a Big Ten plays a SEC team it automatically becomes a much bigger game,” Bacon said. “It’s not Ohio State vs. Michigan. It’s regional pride, man. It’s the Midwest vs. the South. A shocking number of Michigan fans will cheer for Ohio State on that day.”
Now that the Buckeyes are national champions and a unanimous No. 1 in 2015, the perception is the Big Ten is making its play at the SEC. Is that reality?
Continue Reading: Big Ten, SEC poised for latest, maybe greatest chapter yet
