Georgia football: Hard to believe that #93KDay was already four years ago

Want to attack every day with the latest UGA football recruiting info? That’s what the Intel brings. This entry is dedicated to rewinding not just any spring football game, but the spring football game of the Kirby Smart era in Athens. 

(At the beginning of this retrospective, it only makes sense to ask the reader to summon up their best Allen Iverson voice. Read along. Cock that hat a certain way during your mental playback of a very famous sports sound byte. )

“We sitting in here,” Iverson said. “I’m supposed to be the franchise player. We in here talking about practice. I mean listen… we talking about practice. . Not a game. Not a game. Not a game. We talking about practice. Not a game. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it is my last. Not the game. We talking about practice, man. I mean how silly is that. We talking ’bout practice.”

Yes, we are talking about a practice. We are talking about the most glorified practice of any of them during the Kirby Smart era.

We. Talking. About #93KDay. In Athens.

That’s the day Georgia held a glorified practice. Dressed it all up as the traditional G-Day. It was the first spring game of the Smart era in Athens. It showed this was already going to be an elevated Georgia football program.

Smart basically said “Ya’ll come” and make this special. He made that public decree at a basketball game earlier in that year.

They did. Their neighbor did. Everyone at the fall tailgate friends did. They brought along their brother Darryl and their other brother Darrell and even their cousin Chris. He lives in a van. Down by the river.

Georgia actually welcomed 93,000 fans to Sanford Stadium that day for a spring practice. Jacob Eason was the talk of the town then. That factoid does teach us a lot about perspective and elite recruits and how none of us really know what the world of college football has for the brightest of stars and the teams expected to feature them.

We are still talking here about a practice. It was a day that day could have been #105KDay if UGA officials didn’t finally opt to start turning folks away.

It was hard for the usually stoic Kirby Smart not to smile as he saw how emphatically the Bulldog Nation answered his call to turn G-Day 2016 into #93KDay this past Saturday at Sanford Stadium. (RANDY SCHAFER / SPECIAL to DawgNation)

Georgia football: Another big reason to bring up #93KDay  

This day is somewhat historically significant, too. The 16th day of April will mark the four-year anniversary of the first moment where the Smart era was ready to attack every expectation for what the Georgia football program could be in Athens.

It was April 16, 2016. It was all coming down the track.

Has it really been just four years since all of that happened? Has all of that happened so fast?

That was the day when Jacob Eason threw that pass and the recruits who were in attendance wondered if that ovation was for Nick Chubb. Did Chubb get a carry? Was that him coming into the game months ahead of his rehabilitation schedule?

It was the day when D’Andre Swift and his family came down from Philadelphia to ponder how a career in Athens might be different than the Clemsons, Ohio States and Penn States he had been thinking about. Team Swift saw that it was.

Jamaree Salyer and Andrew Thomas were in the stands, too.

“It was just an overall great experience,” Thomas said back then. “If you would have saw the fans there, it was ridiculous. The Fire Marshall was like denying people from coming in. I loved going out on the field. It made me want to go put on the pads and play. I just had a good feeling about that.”

Thomas already liked UGA a lot.

“But it definitely moved them up a little bit farther,” he said two days later.

Thomas committed to Georgia less than three months later. He was set on his way to building a career that might win the argument these days as the greatest offensive lineman in Georgia football history. Especially of the modern era.