As recently announced, Georgia football’s schedule adjustment for 2020 due to the current COVID environment features a 10-game SEC slate, meaning the Bulldogs’ scheduled game with non-conference rival Georgia Tech is canceled. And, with that, the long-standing rivalry widely recognized as “Clean Old-Fashioned Hate” will not be played this season for the first time in 96 years.

You have to go all the way back to 1924 to find a football season when the Bulldogs and Yellow Jackets did not face off in their annual affair. Even in 1943, when World War II was raging and Georgia’s roster had been decimated by the draft, graduation, and injuries, the Bulldogs elected to participate that year (deciding to do so only a day prior to the season opener), joining merely three other SEC schools of the conference's 12 members to field a football team. And, although the result is curiously not recognized by Georgia in the rivalry’s series record (along with that of their meeting in 1944—but that’s another story), the Dogs and Jackets indeed met on the gridiron in ’43.

Now let's look at the crazy events that led to the previous break in the series.

Approximately four months following the conclusion of Georgia’s 1916 season, the United States officially entered World War I after the sinking of seven U.S. merchant ships by Central Powers submarines. Soon afterward, as an average of 10,000 fresh U.S. soldiers were being sent daily to fight in France, most students from the all-male University of Georgia served in the war effort. In turn, the Bulldogs had no choice but to cancel their football campaigns of 1917, followed by 1918.

On the contrary, 70 miles west of Athens on the Flats, the Yellow Jacket (then-Golden Tornado) football program benefited from the war. While Georgia Tech served as a military training ground, the school experienced an influx of students, plenty of whom could play football. As there was no football being played at UGA, Georgia Tech notched a 15-1 combined mark in two seasons (remarkably by an average score of 59.8 to 3.1 against the opposition), including a perfect 9-0 campaign in 1917, or, according to the NCAA, the first time a non-Northeast team could claim an unchallenged national title.

In May of 1919 at Grant Field in Atlanta, Tech hosted Georgia for a two-game series in baseball which, at the time, was the area’s most popular sport. A victory by the Red and Black in the first contest generated “general misbehavior by both sides,” followed up by “boisterous behavior” after a Georgia win in the second game. With a two-game series scheduled between the rivals a week later in Athens, student representatives from both campuses met and literally signed a peace treaty declaring, according to the Atlanta Journal, “that in the future all the battling [between UGA and Tech] would be on the athletic field.”

Still, after the third game a week later, and another Georgia victory, the UGA campus was filled with tension as the school’s Senior Parade commenced before the fourth and final game. In the procession, a replica World War I tank appeared followed by a Ford Model T driven by two UGA students. Both the tank and car displayed banners, each insinuating two different notions. The lead tank read, “1917 GEORGIA IN FRANCE 1918,” indicating UGA was at war in France those two years, whereas the trailing Ford displayed, “TECH IN ‘LANTA 1917-1918,” suggesting Georgia Tech stayed home during the war to play football.

It was said that “the two banners caused more furor between Georgia and Georgia Tech than all the previous athletic clashes combined.” Especially incensed was Tech’s athletic director, J.B. Crenshaw, who demanded a public apology from UGA’s senior class—or all athletic relations between the two schools would come to a halt. It didn’t help relations that Georgia won the fourth baseball game, sweeping the series by a combined 22-9 score in front of 25,000 in attendance.

On top of that, Georgia refused to satisfy Crenshaw’s demand for an apology.

Accordingly, the Red and Black’s scheduled football game at Georgia Tech that November 15 was canceled—and replaced with a meeting against Tulane in Augusta. In fact, there would not only be no Georgia-Georgia Tech football games for the next six years, but no scheduled event pitting the two schools in any sport during that time.

Finally, yet suddenly—unexpectedly and abruptly without a rumor or warning—in March of 1924, it was announced that Georgia and Georgia Tech had simply buried the hatchet, so to speak, and were resuming athletic events against one another beginning in the near future. Apparently, Crenshaw and UGA’s athletic director, Steadman Sanford, had been “secretly” working together for some time on mending the schools’ athletic relations.

Georgia’s 1924 football schedule was already set; therefore, the Bulldogs and Yellow Jackets would have to wait until November 14, 1925, to meet on the gridiron. Nevertheless, Georgia and Georgia Tech fans alike rejoiced that the intrastate rivalry had been restored.

“Let’s admit that there’s nothing we had rather see than a football game or . . . [even] a Parcheesi game between these two valorous institutions,” declared the Journal. “Hail Georgia! Hail Tech! Hail the state of Georgia that holds them both and loves them well!”

Indeed, it was clean old-fashioned hate at its finest.