Saturday! Saturday!

Welcome to a pre-packaged post here on "Off Hiatus". It's Saturday. It's Gameday in Athens. This video from YouTube gives a pretty decent look at a lot of the sights and sounds around town and around campus in Athens on a normal football Saturday.

Unfortunately, if the weather holds up as predicted (as I write this, the prediction is that the temperature will be about 32 degrees when we start tailgating...), tailgating will be more about freezing my ass off rather than watching pretty girls in sundresses. 

Add in the fact that this is the game of marital disharmony: my Georgia Bulldogs take on my wife's Auburn Tigers. Then throw in my wife's two uncles (both Georgia grads) trolling my wife all weekend.

I'm sure it will be a pleasant experience.

In case you're interested, my prediction for the game is that it will be a high-scoring game. If Auburn starts off its game the way it has this year -- which has tended to be slowly and with several turnovers -- and if Georgia capitalizes on both those turnovers and on the emotion that will be running through the stadium with the return of the best player in college football, Todd Gurley, then Georgia wins running away with the game.  If turnovers don't happen, I will be in for a long night because I don't know that Georgia can keep up with Auburn in a shoot-out.

As a second aside, being a Georgia football fan is frustrating. We always seem to have one or two games like the Florida game this year -- where the team doesn't show up, the coaches call plays as if they are scared, the team feels the coaches' fear and plays tight, and suddenly the team is on the wrong side of a blowout. With that said, it would also be the absolutely most "Georgia" thing to do at this point to win out, get to the SEC Championship, win that, but not go to the playoff in favor of random team from the SEC West. 

The only way a 2-loss SEC Champion ends up in the playoffs is if we have similar insanity to what happened in the 2007 season. In that season, Georgia looked like the best team in the country at the end of the year, but a close loss to a decent South Carolina team (better than this year's version) and a horribly embarrassing loss to Tennessee at Tennessee (pretty much the same game as Georgia played against Florida this year) kept Georgia out of the SEC Championship and out of the National Championship game.

UGA would have crushed LSU in the SEC Championship with a loaded roster: Matt Stafford, Knowshon Moreno, Dannell Ellerbe, Geno Adkins, and Mohamed Massaquoi, among others. And UGA would have beaten up Ohio State in the same fashion that LSU did. 

Then again, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas.

But enough ranting; let's get back to baseball.  To keep things moving forward here on the Off Hiatus Blog, here are some cards that I picked up last weekend at my local card show. Yes, again.  These cards all fill in little gaps in my player collections. 

First, it's a die-cut Yovani Gallardo followed by a floating head Gallardo!

Then, we have two New York Met versions of Carlos Gomez's Bowman Rookie Card (one base, one gold) followed by the super purple cosmic swirl insert from Topps Updates of "Carlos Gomez: Power Ranger"...or Power Player.

Surprisingly, a couple of random Greg Vaughn cards appeared in my card searches. I was talking to these two guys who are buddies who buy in bulk and sell cheap on cards and autographs, and in their boxes I found these two cards. The Diamond King card is 1994, I think, and the green monster is a 1990 Donruss The Rookies card.

I'm not pleased with this B.J. Surhoff card from the 1988 Leaf set. Its back is pretty scuffed up, though the front looks fine. So, I'm still in the market for a clean version of this one, but I'm okay paying a few cents for a crappy one that is a placeholder. 

Finally, the first vendor I stopped at had a binder of 25 cent Hostess cards from the 1970s. I picked up two of these Cecil Cooper cards from 1978 and a few others that will be in my next post -- the team set holes being plugged.

Thanks for taking time out of your Saturday to stop in here. I hope that I will be happy when the Georgia game ends some time around 11:00 PM on Saturday.