
Few college towns wrap themselves around a football program the way Athens, Georgia, wraps around the Bulldogs. Georgia Bulldogs football dates to 1892, when chemistry professor Dr. Charles Herty organized the university's first team and scheduled a game against Mercer, the first intercollegiate football contest played in the Deep South. The team competed as the Red and Black until 1920, when Atlanta sportswriters settled on the Bulldogs, and Georgia went on to help found the Southeastern Conference in 1932. Home games unfold at Sanford Stadium, a 93,033-seat bowl tucked into the university's Athens campus.
The program's arc runs through a line of coaches who each raised the standard. Wally Butts won four SEC titles between 1939 and 1960 and coached Heisman winner Frank Sinkwich and All-American Charley Trippi to a national championship in 1942. Vince Dooley, the longest-tenured head coach in school history, delivered the 1980 consensus national title with a perfect season and a Sugar Bowl win, with freshman Herschel Walker powering the offense. Mark Richt added two SEC championships in the 2000s, and Kirby Smart, hired in 2015, took the program to its highest peak: back-to-back College Football Playoff national championships following the 2021 and 2022 seasons, the first repeat by any program in the playoff era. The 2022 team finished 15-0 for the first time in school history and closed it out with a 65-7 win over the TCU Horned Frogs in the national championship game.
The body of work stacks up with any program in the sport: more than 900 all-time wins, ninth in college football history, 64 bowl appearances, second all-time, and five No. 1 overall picks in the NFL draft. Georgia Bulldogs football tickets put you in the middle of the Bulldog Nation on a fall Saturday, when tailgates spread across the Athens campus hours before kickoff and the whole town runs red and black. Rivalry weeks turn the temperature up another notch, whether it is the Deep South's Oldest Rivalry with the Auburn Tigers, the long-running neutral-site showdown with the Florida Gators in Jacksonville, or Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.
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