I don’t like Tennessee. Lane Kiffin makes me want to punch things. I don’t like Alabama or Nick Saban. South Carolina fans take obnoxious to a whole other level (and keep in mind, this is coming from a girl who lives to scream, “Ain’t nothin’ finer in the land than a drunk, obnoxious Georgia fan!” every gameday), and don’t get me started on Steve Spurrier. I don’t like LSU or Auburn either. I HATE Florida. (God, I hate, hate, HATE Florida). And I’m pretty certain Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow combine to form the devil reincarnate.

But Tech fans? They exist in a realm of fair weather and disloyal and classless that I can’t comprehend.

You want to talk trash about our football team this year? Fine. We suck. I know it. You know it. God knows ESPN knows it. So go ahead. Talk trash. I can handle that.

You want to claim we Georgia grads are stupid and will work for you someday? It’s not true (Check my grades and test scores. I dare you. Ten bucks says they’re better than yours.), but fine. Entertain your small minds.

But to go after Uga VII days after he passed away? Classless and cruel.

Yes, Uga is a mascot. But he walks football sidelines 12-14 times a year. He makes a handful of other appearances as well. But every day, whether the jersey is on or not, he is a family pet, and to mock – or worse, celebrate, as this drawing indicates – the death of a family pet is heartless and pathetic.

After news broke of Uga’s passing, I read or heard sincere condolences from fans of every SEC school and many from outside the SEC. Andy Staples, a former Florida walk-on, wrote one of the most poignant columns I’ve ever read on the subject.

Tech, on the other hand, produced this.

You may kick our ass tomorrow. You may continue your brief, cicada-like, nonsensical jabbering for the next year. (Found the quote of the year last week on Bleacher Report: “Tech fans are like cicadas. They come out every 17 years, make a lot of noise and then die.”)

But, at the end of the day, I am a part of a school, a fanbase, a Bulldog Nation that sells out its stadium every week, wears dresses and polos to every game, celebrates its alcohol consumption and would never, ever cheer the loss of a pet, much less create or distribute such a callous image.

And you know what? Regardless of Saturday’s score, that’s good enough for me.

Then, the same Georgia-LSU crew officiated the Florida-Arkansas game last Saturday and made such deplorable calls that I am running out of adjectives for just how bad the state of SEC officiating has gotten.

The truth is, I didn’t watch the Florida-Arkansas game. I was assisting with my best friend’s mother’s wedding, and for the first time since I was 11 (my dad and I talked about it….11 is the most recent year we can come up with) I did not watch a single football play on a fall Saturday. But I saw the clips — and not just of the questionable defensive pass interference or the obvious, uncalled offensive pass interference or the ridiculous (not a strong enough word, I know, but again, running out of adjectives here…) personal foul for a clean block. Florida scores, and Tebow pumps his fist and jumps around and yells and gestures (a hell of a lot more than A.J. Green), and that’s fine. Part of the game. But Green runs to his teammates, and that’s a foul?! This Arkansas lineman lays a clean hit on a Florida guy 20 yards away from the play, and that’s a foul?!

This has to be a joke.

As tempting as it is to buy into, I don’t think the SEC bigwigs are conspiring to set up undefeateds. (LSU and Florida in Baton Rouge the week after Georgia-LSU. Alabama and Florida in the SEC Championship.) Undefeated or not, the SEC has three of the very best teams in football and is without a doubt the strongest football conference, and the quality of league play (and the league’s recent TV deals) ensures that the SEC is making its billions regardless. However, as countless articles and blogs have pointed out, the mere perception of a conspiracy damages the league’s credibility, and boy, do a lot of people perceive that.

Hence, SEC Commissioner Mike Slive decided that this time, there should be a “public hanging,” and suspended Marc Curles — the ref responsible for the [okay, I’m officially out, insert your favorite substitution for “really, really bad” here] personal foul call against Arkansas — and the rest of his crew until Nov. 14.

“A series of calls that have occurred during the last several weeks have not been to the standard that we expect from our officiating crews…I have taken this action because there must be accountability in our officiating program. Our institutions expect the highest level of officiating in all of our sports and it is the duty of the conference office to uphold that expectation,” Slive said in a statement.

In an article by ESPN’s Mike Fish, Curles took accountability. He told Fish he knew he had made a mistake, and passionate fans have called, emailed and texted him not-so-nice things to make sure he knows it. I don’t doubt the man has been harassed, and given his day job as a normal guy with a normal job, a wife and two daughters, part of me does sympathize with him.

Curles also took Fish through the play surrounding the personal foul call from his perspective:

“I saw out of the corner of my eye — the play went over near the sideline. I’m trailing the play, moving in that direction. And out of the corner of my eye, I see a vicious blow, and I see the Florida player go flying down 20 yards behind the play. And in my mind, the Arkansas guy had blindsided him and knocked the player that was completely out of the play, which would have been a personal foul. Obviously, that isn’t what happened. Where I made the mistake is I didn’t see the whole thing. I didn’t see how it developed. I saw out of the corner of my eye what I thought was a foul. I can’t think something is a foul. I got to know it is. And that was my mistake. And I know better than that. What makes me mad at myself is that I know better than to call something if I didn’t see the whole thing.”

And this is where I remain pissed off and infuriated with the SEC.

1. Rogers Redding, the head of the SEC officials, said after the Georgia-LSU game that they tell the refs not to seek out personal foul calls, but if they see them, to call them. Not sure how Redding has been transferring that message to his officials, but clearly, based on Curles’s statement, it isn’t working. Curles was looking for something to call and then exaggerating what he thought he saw. Exactly what Redding claims to tell the refs not to do.

2. Curles admits that his mistake was thinking there might have been a foul instead of knowing. That might be excusable…IF HIS CREW HADN’T MADE THE SAME MISTAKE TWO WEEKS BEFORE!!! Redding and the SEC chastised the crew mere days before for thinking and exaggerating instead of knowing, and yet they go out exactly 14 days later and make an equally [again, have fun with your thesaurus and “awfully, awfully terrible” here] call?!

Curles is getting all the blame here — and don’t get me wrong, he deserves a ton of it — and I guess Slive should get a tiny bit of credit for finally doing something, but the real culprit here is the SEC. The conference is making billions, features the best games and teams every week and still somehow manages to not properly train its officials, even after publicly acknowledging their blatant mistakes. As Tony Barnhart points out, the issue here isn’t just bad calls, it’s the mindset — pushed by people like Slive and Redding — of the officials.

The worst part? There’s a simple solution to all this. Use a tiny fraction of those billions and hire the refs (there are only eight crews) full-time. Or even just full-time in the fall. Give them (a lot) more training, and give them explicit instructions on how not to ruin excellent high-profile games by over-anticipating and imagining costly fouls.

Sigh…

Georgia doesn’t play this weekend. (A nice breather for me. And also an opportunity to figure out if I’m going to Jacksonville next week.) So I won’t be as enthralled as I usually am. Of course, I’ll still be watching. More than that, I’ll be praying that on Monday I don’t hear a statement from Redding or Slive or know the name of another official.

Here’s to a (hopefully) ref-less weekend. Happy fall football Saturday, kids.

However, unlike the week after my trip to Stillwater, I haven’t been absent because of mourning as much as anger.

By now, we’ve all seen/heard/read/deconstructed the egregious celebration flag thrown against A.J. Green after he scored a touchdown to give us a 13-12 lead with 1:09 left against LSU. It was a terrible call live, but when the game was over, I did not walk out of Sanford thinking it had cost us the game.

Part of that was because I had ended up taking my 5-year-old niece (okay, so technically, she’s my second cousin’s daughter, but niece is easier) to the game. Lucy was a joy – perfectly content to stand on the bleachers with her red snow cone and yell “Go Dawgs!” and “A.J. Green!” when prompted – and in her Georgia cheerleading uniform (and later, wearing my oversized sunglasses), she was the star of section 304. But her presence meant that I had to watch my language, split attention between her and the game and ensure that she was happy before ensuring that Joe Cox had completed the pass or Rennie Curran had made the tackle. More than that, though, I believed that our dreadful kick-off coverage after Green’s touchdown was what actually ended the game. When LSU gets the ball inside an opponent’s 40-yard-line, it’s hard to imagine them ever not overcoming a one-point deficit. And while I was certainly upset – my team lost, and I generally don’t deal well with that – I was okay, because I had fun at the game. And before.

LSU fans are crazy.

Nutty. Insane. Wooooah, craaaaaaaazy.

But in the best possible way. Minus the few bad apples (that all fan bases have), they are warm, hospitable, funny, energetic and oh man, do they know how to drink. (Probably has something to do with that proximity to New Orleans, which is only, like, the greatest city in the world…) When I went to Baton Rouge last year, they were perfect hosts, making me Bloody Marys at 10 a.m. and pouring me beer to chug before I entered the stadium, and I and my family/tailgate party tried very hard to return the favor on Saturday. As a result, I was disheartened at the outcome of the game. But not devastated.

Then the videos of the play and blogs dissecting it and “Oh yeah, bad call. Our fault. Nothing we can do about it now. Sorrrry”s from Redding, the officiating crew and Mike Slive and – my favorite – the “whiny Georgia fans, just get over it already” sentiments from the rest of the college football world happened.

And after six days of festering and rationalizing, it’s time for my (informed) rant:

• First, a message for my fellow Bulldogs. Regardless of the call last Saturday (or the bad ones in the Oklahoma State game) or the offensive line’s amnesia for how to block or the defensive’s inability to tackle or Mike Bobo or Willie Martinez or the consistently awful kickoff coverage, Mark Richt’s job should absolutely not be anywhere close to in question.

Have these two loses been difficult? Absolutely. Have the games in between been less than assuring? Yep. Are all of those things previously list concerns that must be addressed? Of course.

But Richt has a higher winning percentage than Vince Dooley. And he   has made this program annually relevant again for the first time since Herschel was running between the hedges. When Ray Goff and Jim Donnan were in Athens we were permanently third in the SEC East, could only solidly count on beating Kentucky and Vanderbilt each year, lost to Tech four years in a row (although speaking of terrible, game-costing calls, anyone remember the Jasper Sanks non-fumble of 1999???) and we killed our own hedges because we beat Tennessee at home. (We wouldn’t dream of upsetting them in Knoxville).

Richt has (re)transformed this program. Our performance on the field once again matches our gorgeous atmosphere and spirit off of it, and Richt deserves most of the credit for that.

So all the “job in jeopardy” stuff needs to stop. Now.

• I still contend that game was ours if we could simply cover a kickoff, especially after seeing this. But the flag very much changed this game. The 15 yards, of course, affected the kickoff. Walsh had been kicking well all game – and into the end zone. He does it again, and LSU has to move the ball 55 yards to attempt a field goal.

More than that, though, the flag definitely distracted players from the 2-point conversion in between the offending “celebration” and the kickoff. If we complete it, the pressure shifts to the LSU offense to tie the game and off of the Georgia defense to lose it. Big difference.

• Georgia fans have been ridiculed for being winy and (more) obnoxious and not accepting that our (lack of good) football plays actually lost the game. As I just made clear, I know there were (big) mistakes after the flag. I don’t blame the flag (completely). And sure, we can bitch and moan with the best of ‘em.

But give us a little credit here, folks. We have EVERY right to be upset, just like every other team would be.

Green makes what could be the definable catch of his career so far, and it’s essentially lost and unimportant a minute later.

We had the #4 team in the country beat on the nationally televised SEC game of the week, and a referee changed that. And as a result, we’re kicked out of the top 25 and sent to the local-only SEC TV.

The head of SEC officials comes out and says it was a mistake. And then told us to get over it. Like Cox said, it’s salt in the wound.

Will our complaining change the outcome? Of course not. But we have every right to be upset and fight the SEC and its corporate heads to make sure this doesn’t continue.

• The bigger issue here is that the SEC is the best football conference in the country with the worst officiating. And frankly, that separation between the quality of teams and the quality of referees is embarrassing and unacceptable. SEC Supervisor Rogers Redding acknowledges the mistake. Awesome. But does he assure us that he’ll do something to make sure calls like this do not continue?  No. Instead, he assures us that the ref who made the call feels bad. Sorry, but that’s not good enough.

Then, SEC Commissioner Mike Slive says that we need to back off; that there’s no need to “hang” the ref. No, Mike, there’s not. But there is a need for you to ensure that perpetually bad refs don’t continue to ruin excellent games.

Furthermore, as Tim Brando pointed out, the SEC just inked a $2 billion with ESPN. The last thing the conference needs is to open itself up to such a potentially controversial issue. Simply put, ending such a classically good SEC game on this kind of note is ridiculous and unacceptable, and it needs to be fixed immediately.

• The last thing we Georgia fans need to remember is that while our two losses this year have been tough to say the least, they do not make us mediocre (despite what the asinine polls say). We lost to a Top 10 team on the road and a Top 5 team at home. We played competitively and had a very good shot at winning both games. Losing sucks. You’ll get no argument about that from me. But as losses go, those are pretty defensible ones. (For more evidence, see David Hale’s post.)

So keep your heads up Dawgs. We still have a lot of season left. And with a young team and a great coach, we have a lot of things to look forward.

And now… Go Dawgs!!