It wasn't a great weekend if you're a fan of Georgia sports teams. Unless, well, you root for the Atlanta Falcons, who finally won their first game of the season on Sunday. But forget this weekend, let's go for this century.
The sports teams might actually be cursed. Maybe the devil really did go down to Georgia—in the name of the Crimson Tide, Los Angeles Dodgers and, well, that 28-3 blown Super Bowl lead still comes to mind.
Let's start with the elephant in the room, and that's the Atlanta Braves, who held a 3-1 lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The Dodgers won Game 5 to survive, then won the next game to set up a winner-take-all on Sunday.
The Braves led early, 2-0, then led by a 3-2 margin. The Dodgers tied it at 3-3, and then a Cody Bellinger blast in the seventh gave the Dodgers their final 4-3 margin they would cling to.
The Braves seemed to clunk themselves on some baserunning blunders that had social media questioning if those players actually ever learned base running.
Braves fans have been let down before. So have Georgia Bulldogs fans. Remember that time when it looked like the Dawgs were going to beat Alabama Crimson Tide for college football's national championship after the 2017 season? However, a kid named Tua Tagovailoa came in and led Alabama to a come-from-behind, overtime win.
Those two teams met again on Saturday, this time as the Nos. 2 and 3 teams in the country. Georgia took a 24-17 lead and looked poised for an upset in Tuscaloosa. However, Alabama coach Nick Saban, who tested positive for COVID just three days earlier and somehow got enough negative tests in 72 hours to coach on Saturday, guided the Tide to another win.
The Crimson Tide won the game, 41-24. Georgia did not score in the second half.
Not that it really mattered, but the Clemson Tigers rolled into Atlanta on Saturday and beat the Georgia Tech Yellowjackets, 73-7. It was the largest ACC conference win by any team in the league's history. Thankfully for Tech, Clemson pulled its starters and put the geography club into the game during the second half.
Speaking of Atlanta, let's talk about the Falcons, who won their first game of the season Sunday. The Falcons are now 1-5, but they have two gargantuan blunders in recent memory.
In the second week of the 2020 season, the Falcons held a 15-point lead over the Dallas Cowboys—at Jerry World in the Dallas Metroplex—with 7:57 to play. Dallas scored a touchdown and missed the two-point conversion, but got the ball back and scored a touchdown with 1:49 to play and cut the deficit to two points.
Dallas lined up for an obvious onside kick. Dallas then squibbed an onside kick that didn't look like it would go 10 yards, so Cowboys players couldn't jump on the ball. If a Falcons player had recovered the ball, then it would have been game over. The ball gently rolled beyond 10 yards, and the Cowboys recovered. Dallas marched downfield and kicked a game-winning field goal.
That's not even Atlanta's biggest choke in Texas, and not even this century. That goes back to Super Bowl LI in Houston. The Falcons took a 28-3 lead over the New England Patriots, only to lose to Tom Brady and the Patriots in the only Super Bowl in history.
This seemed like the year for a Georgia team to break the curse, but maybe it was just another night of when the lights went out in Georgia.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Scott McDonald is a Newsweek deputy night editor based in Cape Coral, Florida. His focus is assigning and writing stories ... Read more
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