Staring into the Eyes of Giants: Georgia vs. Auburn

Goliath, being a giant and all, casts a shadow that goes well beyond the walls of a Sunday School room or even the farthest church pew from the pulpit, and like any figure from ancient times, he goes by many names and comes in many forms. The first Goliath I ever met was William Lattimore: he was the fastest kid in the third grade, and despite shooting a basketball like a Mujahideen with a rocket launcher, he never missed. Then there was Quentin Moses who in middle school stood like a Philistine above a bunch of musty-smelling adolescent Hebrews, and the list could go on to include Michael Hudson of Battlefield Middle or Reed Fairchild of Spotsylvania Middle. Different names. Same effect. When coach asked you to guard one of them one on one or you found yourself eye to eye with them across an imaginary yard marker, you knew they were better, that your legs weren't fast enough, that your arms weren't long enough--that you needed the miracle of a slingshot to slay the giant standing before you.

Auburn's Dirty Play

Russ brought these compilation videos of Auburn's Nick Fairley to my attention in the comments section of our SEC picks last week.  He probably thought watching them might make me feel better after last week's Georgia-Auburn game--they didn't.  I still believe that anytime Auburn is undefeated it's a sure sign that there's something amiss with college football, and it may not have anything to do with pay for play scandals.




Now, I'm definitely biased because I'm a Georgia fan, but these plays suggest to me that Nick Fairley is a dirty player and if he's not dirty, he's definitely living on that line.  I'm not sure the Georgia offensive linemen should have retaliated against him.  It makes it feel like they sunk down to Fairley's level, but I'm not sure what a group of linemen are supposed to do when they've watched a guy not just go after their quarterback but go head hunting on multiple plays.

Is Fairley talented?  Extremely.  But he's also putting others and himself at risk with the savage manner in which he plays.  When a guy like this begins to develop a reputation, almost anything he does will be deemed dirty and the players of other teams will watch him through a lens of "if this guy so much as breathes on my quarterback, I'm coming after him."  But it's not just other players that will watch Fairley more closely: it's the refs as well.  Because of his play, number ninety is now under a microscope with the Iron Bowl coming up, and one has to think that the SEC can not continue to let him maim quarterbacks in this manner.



In the above video, it's possible that Aaron Murray and Nick Fairley's face masks got tangled together, but because of Fairley's reputation, it isn't difficult to imagine that he's intentionally bearing down on Murray's helmet as a means of taunting.  And that's the problem with Fairley's play, it makes everything he does questionable, and while Auburn thoroughly outplayed Georgia in the last three quarters of the South's oldest rivalry last week, Fairley's conduct escalated the hostilities in the game to the point where two of his teammates will now miss the first half of their game against Alabama for throwing punches.  Fairley's play is hurting his own team, and this pattern of play goes beyond the Georgia game, as shown by the following play against LSU:



Auburn is currently being investigated for whether or not it paid Heisman Trophy candidate Cam Newton to play at their school, but sometimes being a dirty program is as much about what you do on the field and not just what you do off of it.