Submitted by admin on Tue, 2006-11-21 08:00. ::
"The saddest point of my career," Ivery said. "Seeing Georgia get the momentum and go ahead of us while sitting on the sideline knowing there was nothing I could do to help my teammates ... it broke my heart."
Freshman Buck Belue came off the bench to lead the Bulldogs to a 29-28 comeback win that afternoon. Belue would direct three more victories over the rival Yellow Jackets before he left Athens.
Georgia took that momentum and built on the win streak, stretching it out two more years. The six-year run is the second longest by the Bulldogs in its century-old feud with the Jackets.
The Bulldogs have owned Georgia Tech this century. They have posted five consecutive wins, four since Chan Gailey took over the program in 2002. Whether a blowout or a nail-biter, a bright and sunny afternoon or a wet and dreary night, it hasn't mattered - Georgia has won.
"It becomes an obsession," said Belue, now an Atlanta sports talk radio show host. "You're thinking about this game 365 days a year. But that can work for you and against you."
Streaks are funny that way. Winning is contagious - but so is losing. The perennial victor runs the risk of overconfidence, while the regular loser can be plagued by doubts.
National polls and records show Georgia has just been better than Georgia Tech over the last half-decade. Those same rankings and win-loss numbers say the Yellow Jackets should be favored this year.
"Once you get a streak going, it sometimes takes a couple of years and one team has to be much better than the other team to break the drought," said former Georgia coach Vince Dooley, who posted four streaks of three wins in a row or more over the Jackets during his career. "The last couple of years, Tech was good enough. There's something to that psychological angle."
The Georgia-Georgia Tech series is littered with streaks. One team has beaten the other in five or more consecutive games six times dating back to the inaugural game in 1893.
Such runs stick with alumni and fans for years after they end. Dooley remembers hearing alumni groan about "The Drought" - Georgia Tech's eight-game winning streak from 1949 to 1956 - in his first season at Georgia in 1964 - eight years after the Bulldogs had already snapped the streak.
Many Georgia Tech players from that era - the Drought Makers - claim their edge over the Bulldogs went beyond psychology. The early years of the streak coincided with the best Yellow Jacket teams in history. The Jackets posted a 31-game unbeaten streak between November 1950 and October 1953.
"We felt like we were going to win every time we teed it up no matter who we were playing," Hall of Fame linebacker George Morris said. "We were simply better than Georgia."
Yet the Yellow Jackets rarely rolled over Georgia during "The Drought." Three of the eight games were decided by seven points or less. Even one of the more lopsided wins, a 23-9 Jacket victory in 1952, was tight.
Tech's mastery of the "Heisman shift" - the forerunner of the pulling-guard play - led to the run that began in 1904. The Belue-Herschel Walker Bulldog teams were among the nation's best, let alone the state's. And four of the five Georgia teams to defeat the Yellow Jackets in the current streak won 10 games or more each season.
Two of the long streaks cannot be attributed to superior skills on one side, though. Both belong to Georgia, and both bridged what were otherwise glory years for the Yellow Jackets.
Dooley clearly tipped the series to the Bulldog faithful when he took over in 1964. Oddly, he brought his own losing streak against Georgia Tech with him to Athens. Dooley played defensive back at Auburn between 1951 and 1953. Georgia Tech beat the Tigers 13 consecutive seasons between 1941 and 1954.
"When Auburn finally beat Tech, we were three-touchdown favorites and won by two points," Dooley said. He exaggerates the spread - the Yellow Jackets won by a touchdown - but the statement underscores the power of a streak.
And he wanted that influence at Georgia. He took note of the old guard's lingering dismay over "The Drought" upon his arrival and set out to make them forget it.
He won his first five games against Georgia Tech, defeating late Georgia Tech coach Bobby Dodd's last three teams, two of them ranked in the top 10. Dodd retired after the 1966 season, and Georgia extended the streak two more years against Bud Carson.
But a sense of urgency must exist to snap any streak, former players on both sides agree. Belue sees that in Georgia Tech going into this week's game and said the end of the most recent streak could be near.
This is cache, read story here
