TAMPA - By the late 1990s we were still hanging on… barley.
TRL was being shoved down our throats. Pearl Jam, Oasis and Nirvana had faded - replaced by those idiots from Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock; 2Pac and Biggie were dead; replaced by Will Smith and Puff Daddy.
Bubble gum in; substance was out.
Andre Young, AKA Dr. Dre., was watching - probably in horror. He’d left NWA and a few years later smashed us over the head with The Chronic, which is certified triple platinum. It was a masterpiece in music - certainly in rap. All that and it gave us this skinny kid from Long Beach, too.
Fast forward to Puff Daddy giving us Ma$e (for God’s sake), and ripping off songs left and right from the 80s and before. Puff was getting more airplay than the likes of something substantive like OutKast.
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According to FanDuel, the Green Bay Packers have -112 odds of making the NFL Playoffs next season.
And Dr. Dre was like: No, this is bullshit - We’ve gone too far.
We had.
So Dre got back in the studio, and after introducing us to another skinny guy (this time from Detroit), Dre was back to hitting us over the head... telling us right out of the gate in “Forgot About Dre” that he had given us Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Snoop and even Eminem, who had line I want to talk about:
“Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got somethin' to say
But nothin' comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of gibberish
And ********** act like they forgot about Dre”
We’ve forgotten about Georgia. And when I say “we” I mean college football, but the SEC, too.
The obsession over the Big Ten winning three national titles in a row; This is a do-or-die year for Texas; ARCH MANNING!; LANE KIFFIN!; Oklahoma has the best defense in the SEC… not Georgia; a 9th SEC game...
Lord.
I have been to each Media Days that’s been held since 2002, so that’s 24 Media Days’ worth of experience to see the stupidity that happens during this event. Everyone’s always looking for an angle; we all have to have something to talk about.
The problem with Georgia, for Media Days at least, is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Georgia isn’t sexy. Gunner Stockton isn’t sexy. Defenses aren’t sexy - not in the summer.
And Media Days isn’t about anything other than what’s sexy. Who has the best quarterback? Probably Ole Miss. Who is the most fun to talk about? Lane. Who has the most pressure? Texas. Who isn’t being talked about a ton, but could be pretty good? Missouri (but the schedule is atrocious). Why is this event in Tampa? I can go on...
I don’t hear much about Alabama, either, which is bizarre because that’s all this event used to be about… partly because of where it was held for so long (in a mall in Hoover... a mall), and more often because of how good Nick Saban’s program was.
We don’t live in talking season any more. That was for the 1990s and 2000s. We are in full blown gibberish season. That’s what this is - gibberish… meaningless, nonsensical ways to fill the summer…
We have landed on the bubble gum pop of the late 1990s music scene - just in Tampa this year (and Nashville next year).
To be a clear: There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with bubble gum. Everyone likes to party. You should be OK to party. And you need party songs. And this might be the time to party. After all, it is hard to lose this time of year.
But the real ones know, and they know what’s coming:
“Kirby Smart is the gold standard,” Oklahoma coach Brent Venables said Monday. “What they’ve done in Athens is very real.”
“There's, there's this kind of quiet confidence I think that Georgia has,” former UGA TE Ben Watson said on the SEC Network Monday. “And as a player you know this: You don't want to be the one that everybody's talking about. You want to be the one with the substance, and Georgia has that.”
They’ve forgotten about the Dawgs. But its summer, and winter is coming. It will be here sooner than you think, and there ain’t no gibberish in the winter... or bubble gum.
“All I know is I’m upstairs listning to my Will Smith CD,” Eminem.
