Each time that Georgia has walked away from Atlanta as SEC champions, the taste of victory has been sweet in its own way.
But of those triumphs, 2005 may have been the most gratifying as Georgia took a 34-14 win against LSU. This one was never really in doubt, thanks to LSU having no answer early for Sean Bailey as he hauled in two DJ Shockley passes for a 14-0 lead.
LSU never really got on track, rushing for just 74 yards and didn’t even score for the second time with less than six minute to go with the game well-decided following a Tim Jennings pick six.
The gratifying that day in the Georgia Dome was not so much the win, but the Bulldogs’ path to get to Atlanta.
LSU earned its trip to Atlanta with an overtime win against Auburn. Georgia? To say that it backed into the SEC East title would have been very fair. After losses to Florida and Auburn, a win over Kentucky gave Georgia a 6-2 SEC record while LSU and Auburn had 7-1 league marks. What’s more is that had South Carolina not upset Florida, the Gators would have won a tiebreaker and taken the division.
It all added up to Georgia being ranked 13th coming into the game and LSU third.
The Dawgs took full advantage of the opportunity, routing LSU, party exorcising the bad memories of the previous SEC Championship Game meeting against the Tigers in 2003.
It can be argued that the 2005 SEC title was the apex of Mark Richt at Georgia. Here was a team expected to be pretty good, but not great on paper as the season began with someone not named David Greene under center.
It had its ups and downs, but it sent a ripple through the league that Georgia, even with the key losses from a dynamic group in 2004 could still be near the top of the SEC,
The other side of that, however, is that less a month later the Bulldogs were on the other side of an upset in the very same building in a Sugar Bowl loss to West Virginia.
Go Dawgs!