Checking in “Behind Enemy Lines“
This week’s column is driven almost 100% by the response on other team message boards and X, from the week that Texas Football has just executed. Tuesday, July 15th, is one that will live as a Landmark Day for Texas and Georgia for their own reasons… for Texas an immensely Pivotal Day that showed a flip on its head of the 2026 recruiting class/cycle and adjustment to plan (at least a little bit) outside of the norm, under Coach Sarkisian.
For Georgia, where do you start? Coach Kirby Smart began the morning on the main stage at SEC Media Day, by continuing to complain about relationship-based recruiting and transactional-based recruiting. Which is RIPE, coming from the most transactional Coach over the last half-decade. Hours later, Tyler Atkinson (LB1 in America, from Georgia) commits to Texas on the Pat McAfee Show. Texas arrived in Atlanta just an hour later and subsequently took over the event with Coach Sarkisian in CEO mode. Arch Manning casually sat in the Tim Tebow/Johnny Manziel overly famous quarterback role. And I’d be remiss not to mention Defensive All-Americans Anthony Hill and Michael Taaffe. They were sort of in the shadow all day, yet still made their names known to the national media.
Within an hour of stepping off the stage in Atlanta, Coach Sarkisian received his 2nd commitment of the Day from the Class, this time by way of a Flip from none other than Georgia. The number 1 ranked Defensive Lineman in America, James Johnson, from Miami Northwestern. Johnson was committed to Georgia for a mere 2.5 weeks, after taking his Official Visit to Texas the week before.
All of these events made me think of a saying that @Alex Dunlap uses sometimes. “It’s like walking into another man’s house and peeing on his rug. Showing him who the Alpha is.”
Or for those who prefer visuals, here is the scene from The Big Lebowski. Try watching and not imagining this being Kirby Smart tilting over his rug getting leaked on by Texas, in Georgia, on Tuesday.
