Former Tennessee wide receiver Jayson Swain didn’t have any trouble deciding who to yell for during Saturday night’s Auburn-Georgia game.
“I was kind of rooting for Georgia to beat Auburn,” he said on Monday afternoon. “I wanted the Bulldogs to be feeling good about themselves this week. I wanted everybody down in Athens telling them how great they are.”
If anyone understands how hard it can be to perform at your best two weeks in a row within the Southeastern Conference – and it would be hard to perform better than Georgia did in last Saturday’s 27-6 dismantling of then-No. 8 Auburn – it might be Swain, who was a key member of a Tennessee team that upset a similarly gifted Georgia bunch between UGA’s famed hedges in 2004, winning 19-14 to snap a 17-game Bulldogs home winning streak.
Played on October 9th of that year – this weekend’s game between the Vols and Dawgs will be Oct. 10 – Georgia was coming off a resounding 45-16 rout of defending SEC champ LSU.
Tennessee, on the other hand, was trying to bounce back from a 34-10 loss to Auburn, which might explain why the Dawgs were 12.5-point favorites. Beyond that, the Vols were ranked No. 17 to UGA’s No. 3.