It started with a squirrel.
A few months back, one day we heard what sounded like a scratching noise coming from inside the eaves over our garage entrance. Well, I thought, I guess we have a critter in there. My wife, an aspirant naturalist, immediately told me that under no circumstances would we call an animal control specialist to remove the little beast. It must need shelter, she reasoned. Why else would it colonize our home? And since the eaves isn’t actually attached to our home, how much damage could it do?
A few days later, my neighbor texted me a video of the squirrel poking his head out of his forced entrance hole on the edge of the eaves. The squirrel was calmly looking up and down the street, surveying the neighborhood like Tony Soprano wearing a bathrobe at the end of his driveway. This is ridiculous, I thought.
A few weeks later, I woke in the middle of the night and heard the squirrel scratching against the interior wall that separates the eaves from the actual house. A day later, an animal control expert we had to pay dearly rousted the squirrel, sealed the hole and set a trap in case Lil Tony Soprano managed to return. If we’d just dealt with it at the beginning, maybe we would have avoided the cash expense? Letting it linger only caused problems.
The squirrel seemed to move on, perhaps to a roomier home in the suburbs, but literally one day later, I was outside the back door of our house when I saw a small brown mouse dart past me toward a weep hole in the foundation. Nah, I thought, there’s no way he’s going into the house. We’ve lived here for almost five years, and we’ve never had a problem with rodents. Now they’re all coming after me at once, like I’m Doctor Doolittle?
A day later, I opened the pantry and found several packages of food chewed through, and the bottom shelf sprinkled festively with tiny turds. After cleaning up the party detritus, I found a slim gap in the back of the pantry, which we taped over until we could manage to seal it more effectively. A day later, the tape was chewed through, and a different shelf had been turded.
Immediately, I drove to Home Depot and picked up a half dozen glue traps, as well as some of that expandable hardening foam stuff I could use to fill his entryway. But first, before filling the hole, I baited the traps with peanut butter and chocolate and left them in the pantry. A few hours later, while I was at work, my wife reached out.
“The mouse is stuck on the trap,” she texted.
“Great,” I responded. “I’ll be home in a bit.”
“I’m putting it in a box in the laundry room. Our son is in love with him, by the way. He’s super cute.”
“I’m going to kill it,” I said.
It had taken me a while to reach this moment, but I was at a breaking point. I had done my best to be understanding, to forgive and accept, to respect life and nature. But in doing all of those things, I was losing. I was ready to win. It was time for me to win.
Next week, my Georgia Bulldogs will take on the Alabama Crimson Tide in the college football National Championship game. The Dawgs are currently 3-point favorites in the game.
Alabama has beaten UGA seven straight times, which includes Tua coming off the bench four years ago to throw a game-winning score in UGA’s last trip to the National Championship game. Of course, those seven games stretch past the beginning of the Kirby Smart era, as Smart himself is on the hook for just four of those losses against Saban. It feels like it stretches back forever: My son was born nine years ago, and we were discharged from the hospital just as Aaron Murray led UGA on a final, fruitless drive down the field against Alabama in the SEC Championship.
For years now, Alabama coach Nick Saban has called media attention “rat poison,” but after Alabama beat Georgia in the SEC Championship game a few weeks ago, he spun “rat poison” in a different direction. “The rat poison that you usually give us is usually fatal,” Saban said, “but the rat poison that you put this week was yummy.”
It was a strange analogy, and his delivery made it a bit creepy, but I think what Saban meant was all the experts and pundits predicting an Alabama loss were feeding into the underdog narrative Saban was selling to his squad. (How in the world Nick Saban convinced his team of defending national champs and five-star recruits and a Heisman winner that they were the underdogs in any matchup is another column altogether.) What’s really wild is Saban had Alabama believing they were the underdogs, and that tactic worked and they won, and now this week they’re playing the same team that they beat before, and somehow now they actually are underdogs!
I love the Dawgs, but I don’t know if I believe UGA can actually beat Bama. A large part of the blame for Georgia’s recent failures has fallen at the feet of QB Stetson Bennett, who is 0-2 when he starts against Alabama. At the same time, EVERY QUARTERBACK who has started against Alabama over the last three seasons has gone a total of 3-37. Beating Alabama is really, really, really hard, and there’s no shame in Bennett failing at the two chances he’s had to defeat the Tide. Would backup QB JT Daniels be a better option for the Dawgs? Perhaps – you could argue he wouldn’t do any worse than Bennett has done — but Bennett was terrific last week against Michigan (20-30, 313 yds, 3 TDs/0 INTs), and it’s hard to believe there’s anyone in the UGA quarterback room who is any hotter than Bennett at the moment.
Perhaps UGA is favored because Alabama will be without WR John Metchie, who helped Bama torch UGA’s secondary in the last matchup. But Alabama has plenty of fine receivers, and that “next man up” mentality is particularly applicable at a school loaded with five-star recruits.
The only way I think UGA stands a chance is if they try and speed up Alabama QB Bryce Young. During the SEC Championship loss, UGA seemed content to sit back and let Young pick them apart. And so he did. As Seth Emerson wrote in The Athletic…
“Yes, Georgia did use plenty of four-man rushes: By my count on re-watch, 22 of Young’s 48 dropbacks saw Georgia only rush four, while there was also one three-man rush. Almost all of Alabama’s big plays came out of those. Meanwhile, there were 12 five- or six-man rushes, and they went much better. There were also 14 other passes where the ball got out so quickly it either wasn’t evident how many rushed or it didn’t matter.
The results: Young was 13-for-19 for 297 yards and three touchdowns when Georgia rushed four or fewer defenders. When Georgia rushed five or more, Young was 1-for-11 for 24 yards. So…yeah, pretty stark.”
Alabama is great because they drill down on whatever your weakness is and they relentlessly attack that weakness. Against UGA they passed down the field. Last week, against a smaller Cincinnati team with a good secondary, Alabama ran for over 300 yards on their way to a blowout win.
Alabama hits you where it hurts. Now it’s up to UGA to be prepared for that possibility. It’s been a long haul for UGA to get to where they are this week, and they’ve got the mouse (the elephant?) cornered. Instead of poison, however, perhaps this time they’ll try a glue trap? A wooden trap? Anything other than rat poison. We’ve seen how Nick Saban loves rat poison.
By the way, I got home from work and found myself summarily overruled regarding the mouse. My wife and son had rescued him from the glue trap and placed him in a shoebox. My son and I then drove to a field a few miles away and released the mouse, where he cautiously stumbled out of the box and trotted off into the tall grass. As my son and I drove away, I started doing the math in my head, trying to figure out how long it might take that mouse to make it back to my house for another all-he-can-squeak buffet.
To be honest, I am totally expecting that mouse to show back up at my house in a day or so. We removed our pest from the equation, but we didn’t take him out when we had the chance. If there’s anything we’ve learned from Nick Saban, it’s that you have to take advantage of that opportunity when it’s presented.
Because otherwise, the rat can start to enjoy the poison.