UPDATED: Georgia football’s most memorable wins over Florida
Appleby to Washington
Again in 1975, the Gators rolled into Jacksonville needing a win over Georgia to secure their first SEC Championship, a pattern in Florida Gator football history. As happened time and again before, Georgia won and the Gators denied. The method Georgia chose to execute its sworn Bulldog duty was on this occasion the most delicious of all.
After several years of frustration topped by a humiliating 1974 home loss to Tech in a 32 degree drizzle, calls of “Dump Dooley” rang through out the spring of 1975. But in the fall of 1975, Georgia entered the Junkyard Dawg era. Relying on a swarming pack of athletes on defense and a non-Dooley-esque veer offense manned by a couple of freshman quarterbacks, Ray Goff and Matt Robinson, Georgia surged back to the top of the SEC.
Top secret weapon
Florida, brimming with talent commensurate with it’s eventual NCAA troubles, was nevertheless the favorite to beat Georgia. Georgia’s plan, it seemed, took the entire season to unfold, and the second half explosion can still be heard, “We’re gonna throw a bomb!!”
Throughout the year, Georgia effectively ran tight end Richard Appleby on the end around. It was not a trick play as much as it was a staple of the Georgia offense. Appleby, a lanky athletic Athens native who came to Georgia with his high school teammate Horace King, ran with the shiftiness of a tailback.
However, kept a secret within the confines of Milledge Ave and Rock Springs road, the campus of Clarke Central High, was Appleby’s ability to throw the football a hundred yards. The Bulldogs kept this talent under wraps as well, and when Matt Robinson, the designated throwing quarterback, handed the ball to Appleby in the Gator Bowl in 1975, the speedy athletic Florida defense converged.
Appleby to Washington
Of course, you know the rest. Appleby “stopped, planted his feet” and dropped a perfect strike into the arms of the fastest man in Jacksonville on that day, Gene Washington.
Having watched Richard Apppleby throw the football on the Clarke Central practice field, I can only imagine the shock the world felt. But that’s ok. I can live with it.