A collapse is sudden and immediate.  For the 2008 Georgia Bulldogs to have collapsed, as suggested in the title of this article, one would certainly be able to finger the precise second the whole building went kaput — if a man stood in the proximity of the metaphorical structure that was the Georgia Football ’08, at what point did he see it teeter and start to crumble?  At what point did he he say “oh shit?”

A collapse is immediate and irreversible.  The sports version of this metaphor assumes that prior to its breakdown, a team has achieved something of significance, or is on its way to achieving something of significance, or has performed well enough for others to anticipate the significant achievement looming on the horizon.  In the sports world, a collapse is losing twelve of seventeen to relinquish first place and miss the playoffs.  A collapse is bogeying holes nine, ten, and eleven, and watching a six stroke lead vanish with a double bogey on sixteen.  Sure, the flashy, sexy wins that closed out 2007 beget high offseason expectations, but hype does not equal achievement.

In the analysis of sports, it is easy to fall into the habit of using cliches.  They are easy to learn and remember and repeat; it is easy to find ways to apply them to your team, or your life, or whatever.  The sentence that takes form [TEAM]+[CONJUGATION OF THE VERB "TO BE"]+overrated is a predictable and colloquial way of saying that a team is not good without having to explain why.

And yet, here it is listed as the number one reason that Georgia “collapsed” in 2008 (the quotation marks surrounding the word ‘collapsed’ exist to SHOW sarcasm).  Teams do not lose because they are overrated.  Football teams are measured by their performance on the gridiron; teams lose because they turn the ball over too often, because they miss tackles and assignments and field goals, because their offense cannot gain yardage with any consistency.  Whether or not a team is overrated is a measure of a team’s on-field performance against their expectations — a team with a high national ranking and an inability to win convincingly against inferior competition might warrant the label “overrated,” but being “overrated” does explain (or justify) a team’s less-than-desirable results.

Georgia did a lot of things poorly on the football field this year that contributed to defeat — not preventing Alabama from converting a third-down in the first half, the turnovers against Florida, seemingly countless drive-killing or opponent-drive-reviving penalties, the refusal to tackle Georgia Tech during the second half — but “Playing defense while overrated” is not one of them.

To suggest another reason for the “collapse” is the ease with which “the team bought into the hype” is similarly flawed and also impossible to prove.  Georgia never did play a complete, four-quarter game (ala Auburn in 2007), but to argue the Dawgs lack of consistency is due to the team’s collective refusal to resist the glamor and celebrity that accompany a lofty preseason ranking is pure speculation.  Any argument suggesting that a lack of consistency is the direct result of any one (or five) reason comes off as an excuse, as if the purveyor does not want to admit that perhaps this Georgia football team could not play a complete game of football at a high level because they were not capable of it.  There was never a point where the 2008 Bulldogs looked like a national championship caliber team.  Is it because they bought into the hype, or because they weren’t a national championship caliber team?

Leadership is a different animal, it is difficult to gauge and grasp and quantify.  A team of fragile leprechauns could have the greatest leader on the planet, but it wouldn’t necessarily translate into wins if the Scotland University Fragile Leprechauns had to play in the SEC East.  Certainly, poor leadership seems to prevent teams from competing at the capacity they are capable of, but for a person to assume that Ole Miss’s leaders were superior to Arkansas’ leaders because Ole Miss had a better season is misguided at best.

So the Stinchcomb anecdote is nice and all, but to insinuate that the leaders of that ’02 team stepped up because “the Dawgs went into the Auburn game knowing that Eastern Division was on the line” is ridiculous, even in the absence of any sort of sample size.  Since the 1992 divisional alignment, only one team (Georgia 2005) has won the SEC East outright with more than one loss (note:  three teams have won the East with two losses via tiebreaker).  The division is perpetually on the line.  Leaders always step up.  That’s what they do.

Good leadership does not just materialize during halftime of a conference game, or in the huddle before an important drive.  Leadership is an omniscient force that governs a team from the morning the season opens to the evening the season ends.  It is earned on the mats in the offseason, cultivated in the drills of the spring, harnessed in the mandatory-but-”unofficial”-practices-which-maintain-NCAA-compliance of the summer.  Georgia did not get taken behind the Gator’s woodshed because of leadership.  Georgia lost to Florida because Florida’s offense outplayed Georgia’s defense, because Florida’s defense outplayed Georgia’s offense, because Florida’s cheerleaders out rah-rah-rahed Georgia’s cheerleaders.  Leadership plays a role in the formation of a team over the year — Georgia did not lose to Florida because no one at halftime in Jacksonville stood on a stool and screamed like Stinchcomb once did.

Joe Cox for Heisman.

It’s never too early to jump on a bandwagon.