Legge's Thoughts: Remembering Former UGA Football Star David Andrews' Football Legacy
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ATHENS - The fact is that David Andrews just needed a shot.
The late rounds of the 2015 NFL Draft came and went without Andrews being selected. It sounds cliche, but that might have been the best thing that ever happened to him… and one of the best things to happen to the New England Patriots these last ten years.
Eight of those ten years saw Andrews as a team captain of the franchise. The two Super Bowl titles - a 34-28 comeback win over the Atlanta Falcons, and 13-3 fight and win over the LA Rams - during Andrews’ time with the Pats were the high-water mark of that franchise over the last decade.
An undrafted player going on to be the captain of a franchise is rare, but this is Andrews we are talking about. It would be pretty surprising if he didn’t leave his mark on any organization that he was in.
Andrews’ time in the NFL concluded an athletic journey that started at Wesleyan in the 2000s. He went from Wesleyan to Athens, where he watched another pretty good center - Ben Jones - work before taking over the starting spot there in 2012.
Andrews was confident, smart, hard working and tough - in fact, he might have been confident because of his toughness. Andrews didn’t fit the stereotype of a small, private school football player. His physicality was likely underestimated, which is probably why he went undrafted - and slightly underrecruited.
I watched for years from the sideline, and on the other end of a microphone as Andrews did all he could to reinvigorate Georgia - a program that was in a terrible slide in 2010 when he committed. At various camps he travelled to during the recruiting process he talked with other prospects about why he was going to Georgia, and that he had no doubt about what was coming at UGA. Isaiah Crowell was the prize of the so-called Dream Team recruiting class in Athens for Mark Richt that winter, but Andrews had a better career than anyone in that class. There is no way insiders thought that at the time. No. Way.
Could they have known what Andrews would earn on the field over time? Looking back we know what we know now, but there were signs that Andrews would succeed along the way, but the best professional career of anyone?
Also, that was a trying time in Athens. . Andrews and the Bulldogs of his time had more near misses than anything.
The 2014 season went up in smoke when Todd Gurley was suspended by the NCAA for selling autographs. The 2013 season was sidelined with one injury after another - including Aaron Murray’s college-ending injury that November against Kentucky.
I looked through database of images I have of Andrews through the years. There are 428 so-called “keepers” I have of him dating back to his days before being committed to UGA. I wanted to show this audience a few of the ones that show was Andrews was like.
For clarity’s sake: It is hard to focus game photography on an offensive lineman. First, they are linemen… no one cares about them. Second, Andrews played center - meaning someone (a coach, an official, another player or a defender) was nearly always covering him up. But there are a few shots in here that show the journey he made in from Atlanta to Athens to Foxborough.
Did the joy of winning it all against the Falcons in one Super Bowl, and winning the other Super Bowl in Atlanta a few years later take away the pain of losing the de facto national title game against Alabama in 2012? That’s what I wonder about. Andrews loved Georgia, and that moment had to be the most painful on-field conclusion of his time in Athens (although losing to Georgia Tech in 2014 was probably up there, too).
There was one picture in particular that I remember most from Andrews’ time at Georgia. The shot below is of Andrews walking off the field as time expired in the 2012 SEC Championship Game in Atlanta. If a picture is worth 1,000 words - this one certainly captures the heartache of that moment.
The play ended about ten seconds before this image - that fast, and not just the game, but his best chance to win it all in Athens was over - with blue, white and yellow confetti surrounding him on that painful walk to the locker room of the Georgia Dome.
