Bulldogs

Athens had no football team worth the name until students at the University of Georgia put one together in 1892, and for a program that has spent well over a century since then, the story is less about survival than about what it eventually built around Sanford Stadium. The ground now holds nearly 93,000 people on Saturdays, a figure that has grown the program into one of the sport's largest gatherings rather than a college fixture that happened to expand.

Red and black have been the colours throughout, and the nickname Bulldogs has stuck just as long, but the identity of the program owes more to specific seasons than to any constant thread. 1980 sits at the centre of it: a national championship and a Southeastern Conference title in the same year, the kind of double that a program can spend decades chasing again. Georgia did not manage it again until 2017 brought another conference title, and then 2021 and 2022 delivered back-to-back national championships, with the SEC crown following again in 2022 and once more in 2023.

Herschel Walker's name still carries weight in Athens, the sort of player a program measures itself against long after he has moved on, and the flow of talent into the NFL from this roster has become as much a marker of the program's standing as the trophies themselves.

Four national championships now belong to Georgia, spread across more than eighty years between the first and the most recent.