Mark Richt, head coach of the Georgia Bulldogs, recalls Halloweens past when he dressed as Batman. So does NBA great and UGA alum Dominique Wilkins. So does current NBA superstar LeBron James. I guess I'm in pretty good company.

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I don't think I've ever been in a stadium of 80,000 people who expected their team to lose before. After the last two weeks, the so-called UGA faithful Bulldog Nation held their breath on every play. The stadium was so quiet, I could hear the electronic buzz from the stadium PA system.

And we were almost not disappointed. Down only 3 points with no timeouts remaining, Mississippi State had the ball near our 20 yard line with 18 seconds left to play. Their quarterback didn't seem to understand the necessity of not taking a sack under any circumstances. When we hit him, he lost the ball. Though we recovered, it wouldn't have mattered, since no time remained on the clock and no other plays were run in the game.

So we won the game, no thanks to our own players. I heard "fans" in the crowd compare Matthew Stafford (3 picks) with Quincy Carter and Mohamed Massaquoi (3 drops and a fumble) with Terrence Edwards. One guy was verbally flaying OT Daniel Inman alive for his 3 false starts. After time expired, most of the crowd left with their head down as though we had lost. It's been a long season already.

Next week: Florida. Ick.

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I said before today's game that the worst part of a potential loss to Vanderbilt would be being exposed to the world as a bad football team. And then we lost to the Commodores.

The picture above was taken just after the Dores kicked the game winning field goal (leaving 2 seconds on the clock: don't get me started on how poorly refs in the NCAA have handled clock management this season). That's Vandy celebrating on the right. They hadn't beaten us in 11 years.

The worst part? After the game, I realized that we have very little chance of beating Florida, Auburn, or Georgia Tech this year. That will give us, at best, a 7-5 record. Ouch.

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Damn, that sucked. The Tennessee band played Rocky Top 20 times between kickoff and final clock expiration. Of those 20, only 2 were in the first half. I hate Rocky Top.

Our highly-rated defense gave up 51 points. That's 17 more points than we had given up to our first 5 opponents combined. Ugh.

Note for next year that for 4 consecutive years, the away team has won the UGA vs. Tennessee game.

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Whoa, Nellie! Lookout, Dawgs! It's a stampede!

Please note that no Dawgs were hurt during the making of this picture. Colorado brought their 900 pound buffalo mascot, Ralphie IV, to Athens to lead the team onto the field. (Ralphie IV, by the way, was donated to Colorado by Ted Turner.) Earlier this week UGA athletic marketing director John Bateman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "It's David and Goliath. But what's that old saying, 'It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog'?"

Bulldogs, by the way, were originally bred for -- what else? -- fighting bulls. Ralphie IV, however, is not a bull but a female buffalo. That should have been our first clue that we were in trouble.

We played like we didn't understand the game for 3 quarters, only to pull it together in the final 10 minutes of play for the victory. The entire game was a demonstration in coaching: be Dan Hawkins' play selection and execution in the 1st half, be Mark Richt's strategic determination in the 4th quarter. (Just plain be somewhere else for the third quarter.)

Colorado's excellent ball fakes kept our undisciplined defense confused. Meanwhile our offense decided to go pass-happy with our true freshman quarterback, ignoring the 3 talented runners that have won us the last 3 games. (I call this Tommy Tuberville Syndome after Auburn's similar bizarre and losing strategy with Cadillac Williams and Ronnie Brown three years ago.)

I should have taken a picture of the guy who sits next to me. He looked like he was going to have a stroke for the final hour of the game.

In the end, we won. And it was exciting. But I don't exactly want to go through this every week.

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Dawgs win again, beating a helpless UAB team without really trying. And as happy as that makes me, I'm kept grounded by the Dolphins' considerably less exceptional second loss. It's going to be a long, long NFL season at this rate.

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Recently I was asked if I was forced to choose between Batman and football, which would I choose to eliminate from the world. In honor of such a stupid question, I declare September "Batman and Football month." Batman and football for all!

Dawgs 41, Western Kentucky 12. In the first quarter, UGA's Micky Henderson returned a punt the length of the field and then fumbled during his celebration just before he reached the goalline. On the next WKU punt, Henderson returned the ball the length of the field again, this time remembering to hold onto the ball. It was a very exciting way to open the game.

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I just realized that I've wasted my entire afternoon (the last few hours, anyway) looking at pics of abandoned amusement parks on the internet. I can't help it. I know I've mentioned it before, but I'm just fascinated by scenes of manmade structures overcome by nature. Best of all are the fallen amusement parks: titans of technology devoted to staving off mankind's worst enemy -- boredom -- left fallow and destroyed by sun, wind, water, and time. If these haunted steel and concrete skeletons are discovered by future archaeologists, what conclusions will they draw about their ancestors?

See the ruins of Chippewa Lake Park in Ohio. Wander through abandoned Dogpatch USA in Arkansas. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, visit the orient to see the remains of "waste recreational area T" or "Nominal Koka family land" in Japan, the home of the decaying theme park.

>sigh< It's like poetry for the eye.

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Straight from the sewage to the suckage. I'm relatively positive that future generations of Dawgs fans will remember the 2006 Sugar Bowl as the game where the rednecks lost to the hillbillies! Bah.

Here's to 2007!

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By the skin of their canine teeth, the UGA Dawgs continued their winning streak after a 23-20 nail-biting win vs. Arkansas. I've been here for wins vs. Tennessee and Auburn, and the last 6 minutes of this game were about as desperately exciting as it gets in SEC football. The home crowd was on its feet and screaming until the last 44 seconds. Who says that homecoming games are supposed to be easy? I think the scoreboard says it all today:

Even though we may have lost Shockley just before the Cocktail Party in Jacksonville, I promise to savor the win for a whole weekend to before I start fretting about FLA.

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