The sUGAr Bowl

I hope everyone is coming off a good Christmas and settling into that exciting, pleasant hum that beats on the horizon when the Mean Machine starts rolling toward New Orleans.

This is our fourth College Football Playoff appearance in five years, which is absolutely insane when you stop and think about it. Especially when you remember that the one Georgia team that didn’t make the playoff during this run may have been our best (the 2023 squad that went undefeated and then beat Florida State 63–3 in the Orange Bowl.) But I digress.

The 2025 Bulldawgs are an all-time operation. We’ve got a quarterback who already belongs to the folklore. He dates Vince Dooley’s granddaughter. His grandfather was arrested “between the hoses” at Auburn and later died in a Jacksonville parking lot after the Florida game, lamenting Todd Grantham’s defense. All of that is true. No notes. It’s how we all want to live and die.

On the field, this team has done nothing but take scalps. Exhilarating, improbable wins in Knoxville and after dark at Auburn. Statement wins at home over the best Texas and Ole Miss teams in generations. An arse-kicking in Jacksonville so thorough our aforementioned QB hero took a knee on the one instead of stepping over the goal line for a gratuity touchdown. And earlier this month, we finally closed the curtain on any lingering afterglow of the Saban era in Atlanta. A brighter shade of red now sits atop the SEC pinwheel.

Which brings us to the Sugar Bowl.

There’s a certain romance to this game that got lost for a while. It used to be an end unto itself. Then it became a consolation prize. Today, it’s a stepping stone to something bigger, but it’s still a big game, in a very unique SEC city, and this year against a school that probably mythologizes New Orleans even more than we do.

Growing up, the Sugar Bowl felt like the grand dame of bowl games. Stories of family members making the pilgrimage to New Orleans and seeing (doing?) who knows what in the Quarter were passed down at holiday tables and became mythological in their own right. I know many of you feel the same pull.

So here’s to a long lunch at Galatoire’s, milk punch all around before they run out. Dinner upstairs at Commander’s. Eating to the point of regret at Clancy’s. Oysters at Drago’s. A room at Arnaud’s. Café du Monde…or Café Beignet if the first sight of that line breaks your spirit. Here’s to politely agreeing with Ole Miss fans that “we’re actually very similar,” while carefully not expressing the deep, private horror you feel that they sought higher education and social identity in northern Mississippi.

Here’s to eating and drinking, drinking and drinking, that unmistakable smell of stale alcohol on the cobblestones, and the feeling that your own cadre of ancestral ghosts have done this exact same thing…making it feel like home even though it’s weird, and it is absolutely not home, and it is probably as close to Satan and his merry band of demons as we will geographically feel in this mortal coil.

Which fits.

Because, as we all know…

Them Dawgs is Hell.