This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.
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I.
This is a story that may or may not be entirely true, but hell, it was four decades ago, so I’m going straight-up Liberty Valance on this one and printing the legend. It’s about a wide receiver for the Oklahoma Sooners named George Rhymes, who went by the nickname of Buster, apparently because he kept trying to kick the sides of his crib as a baby, as if he wanted to bust right out of there.
Buster Rhymes grew up in Miami, but committed to Oklahoma in 1980, at a moment when when his hometown program had yet to become a national power, and when the Sooners were winning Orange Bowls pretty much every year under Barry Switzer. They were a dynastic program that would soon win a third national title for Switzer in 1985, which came right after that time when an angry Buster Rhymes, after getting pelted during a snowball fight on campus, reportedly pulled out an Uzi and fired a few dozen warning shots out of his dorm room window. (And yes, in case you are unaware, that Buster Rhymes inspired the moniker of this Busta Rhymes.)
It took a few years for that Buster Rhymes story to go public, and by then, things had gone completely sideways at Oklahoma. The linebacker Brian Bosworth, after attempting to assert his personal authority over the NCAA by declaring them Communists, told the Buster Rhymes Uzi story in a tell-all autobiography written with Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly, some of which Bosworth later disavowed. Meanwhile, Switzer was largely disavowing everything until he was forced to resign in 1989.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, both from writing about college football and learning how to write screenplays, it’s that a lot of modern college football dynasties play out to the beats of a Martin Scorsese film…
This particular dynasty had reached that stage in the Scorsese dramatic progression where the protagonist begins seeing imaginary helicopters or overdosing on qualuudes. It was all coming too quickly; it was all too much for a group of young people to handle. Oklahoma’s dynasty appeared impregnable, and then overnight, it was gone. These things are always way more fragile then we realize.
II.
A week ago, a cornerback for the Georgia football team named Daniel Harris was clocked driving 106 m.p.h. in a vehicle while allegedly not wearing a seatbelt. This was not an isolated incident: Several Georgia players were arrested on driving-related incidents last season, and during the offseason, despite the fact that a Georgia player and a staffer died in a car accident in 2023 while allegedly racing another teammate.
This was not the first warning sign to emerge out of the Georgia program; it may not be the last. At least for now, I have to take Georgia coach Kirby Smart at his word when he says he’s trying to make it stop. But sometimes these things grow out of control before a coach even realizes what’s happening; sometimes a toxic culture takes on a life of its own. This is a team that has lost two games and won two national championships in the past three seasons. If they are not already a dynasty, they are on the verge of becoming one. And yet you can kind of feel a reckoning coming at Georgia; you can feel things beginning to fray around the edges. I watched much of their ugly 13-12 win over Kentucky last Saturday, and it felt as if they were sleepwalking the entire game.
Was that game a flashing warning beacon? I don’t know, but we’ll find out soon. In two weeks, Georgia travels to Alabama to face the Crimson Tide for the first time since Nick Saban’s retirement. Ideally, this would be their moment to prove that this is now firmly the Georgia Era; but in a sport that feels as if it is in such prodigious flux, there are no guarantees.
The miracle of Saban’s tenure at Alabama was that he was able to keep things in balance for as long as he did, without enduring any prodigious scandals. He ruled with just enough of an iron hand that he was able to keep control of his program. And honestly, I don’t know if we’ll ever see anything like that again. A 12-team playoff introduces an element of randomness to the postseason that wasn’t there before; the whole NIL thing would seem to foster a top-heavy structure, but maybe we’re all wrong about that part. Maybe it’s going to be harder than ever to keep a dynasty together with all these outside complications. Maybe we’re entering an era with more parity than we think.
Already this season, as Pat Forde reports, several mid-major teams have pulled off prodigious upsets; there will be at least one more during the playoff that will catch us all off-guard. As Scorsese has taught us, there is a fine line in America between fomenting a dynasty and fizzling into paranoia and self-parody, and increasingly, Georgia would appear to be dancing on that tightrope.
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