ATHENS – If Georgia is able to win its first football national championship in 41 years, Vince Dooley will be there in person to witness it.
The Bulldogs’ 89-year-old former coach actually planned to be at the Orange Bowl on Friday. But Tuesday, two days before he was supposed to accompany UGA’s official party to Miami, Dooley was diagnosed with the latest variant of COVID-19.
He said he wasn’t feeling particularly bad then, nor is he now. He was just trying to be safe.
“I started getting a little bit a cold,” Dooley said. “I decided I should go by St. Mary’s (hospital) and get checked, just in case. I didn’t want to get on that airplane if I had a problem. Sure enough, and I was absolutely shocked, they told me that I had it.”
So, Dooley canceled.
“What’s even worse,” Dooley said, “is after 58 years, I’d promised Barbara I was finally going to take her to the Orange Bowl. Now I’ve got to figure out another way to do it. We just didn’t go.”
For now, the plan is to go Indianapolis. Dooley said he will have long cleared protocols by the time Georgia’s secondary group makes the trip Saturday. The team is traveling separately Friday.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve been invited to go,” said Dooley, who led the Bulldogs to the national title in 1980 and won 201 games over 25 seasons. “Unless something unusual happens, which can happen, I plan to go.”
Dooley is still rehabbing from a broken hip suffered in early October but reports that he’s getting around “much, much better” now.
READ MORE: A timeline of Vince Dooley’s career at UGA
Bowers ‘is fine’
Coach Kirby Smart put a scare in the Bulldog Nation last weekend when he mentioned that they pulled out Brock Bowers during the Orange Bowl because of a shoulder injury. Asked about it again Monday, he assured that the record-breaking freshman tight end is “fine,” and the training staff was just using caution.
“He’s good. He was good in the game,” Smart said. “That same shoulder has bothered him all year, to be honest. It’s not like it’s something new that just came up. It bothers him from time to time at practice.”
Smart said Bowers’ is suffering from a chronic shoulder issue that may or may not need more surgical attention in the offseason.
“It happens to a lot of our players; I had it when I played,” Smart said. “It’s something you have to just deal with. … But he’s a football player. It’s not going to go away in season. A lot of our guys are dealing with that.”
Junior linebacker Nakobe Dean is among several Bulldogs who underwent offseason shoulder procedures last winter. Dean won the Butkus Award this season.
Bama the ‘Bogeyman’
One of the funniest moments of Monday’s round of six CFP video interviews was Smart’s response to a reporter’s question about whether Alabama had taken on a “bogeyman” persona for Georgia. The reporter pronounced it like a bogey in golf, as opposed to “boogie man,” as it’s used in typical Southern parlance.
“First off, what is the bogeyman? What did you reference it as?” Smart asked in reply.
“Bogeyman,” she reiterated, “to Georgia football.”
“Well, I don’t know exactly what that is, so it’s hard for me to answer that question, other than they’ve also been a problem and a thorn for any team they’ve played besides ours,” Smart said with a smile. “We have that in common with a lot of teams they’ve played.”
