No. 198 - Poor Man’s Game Notes XII: Sugar Bowl, 1/1/26

It’s Christmas night as I write this…fireside, in plaid pajamas, on what I believe is my seventy-eighth cup of eggnog.

Which means I’ve enjoyed north of thirty thousand calories of holiday cheer.

To balance that indulgence, I’ve smoked a few dozen calorie-free cigars. This is what you call decadent economics. It may not make sense to you, but it lets me sleep at night. Mind you, until my late thirties, I was convinced whiskey cured the common cold.

So what does this have to do with another game against Ole Miss? You’d be right to ask. No one would blame you for squinting, furrowing your brow, thumb and forefinger on your chin, wondering why anyone would listen to a man who once drank George Dickel to treat a cough he got from smoking too many cigars. I ask that you read on, as I will explain what I can only assume will one day earn me a Nobel Prize: a dissertation on decadent economics and Southern football.

So what is this ridiculous decadent-economics-cancellation theory? Put simply, it is the art of offsetting one excess with another, through logic so flawed it borders on genius.

You see, Milton Friedman, acclaimed economist, Nobel laureate, and noted killjoy, hated Ivy League football. And who can blame him? Columbia, his alma mater, hasn’t won a conference championship in over sixty years. So, I’m told, he quietly rooted for the Dawgs when he wasn’t lecturing heads of state. I have this on good authority to be maybe true. A Burt Reynolds impersonator told me at the Sunbelt Festival in Moultrie.

As luck would have it, I later ran into Milton at the New York Athletic Club. After a lengthy discussion on monetary policy and his disdain for the eggs Benedict, I asked him about the Burt Reynolds impersonator. Shockingly, he didn’t remember the man, but I did get him to admit—reluctantly—that he roots for the Dawgs.

I then presented my theory, which he conceded was not, in his words, “a terrible idea.”

Let’s apply this framework to Georgia versus Ole Miss.

Our Dawgs are superior in every conceivable category, right down to the uniforms. We are thirty thousand calories of eggnog; they are a shot glass of still water.

But in the tradition of knucklehead economics, one must ask: are we, dare I say, too good?

Does Georgia’s superiority cancel itself out in some nonsensical way?

Or, in a Faulkneresque twist of fate, does Ole Miss’s inferiority become an advantage?

My greatest concern is what I call Lane Kiffin Chaos Theory. Will the madness in Oxford somehow neutralize Kirby’s discipline?

This, dear reader, is precisely what decadent economics seeks to explain. I’ll leave the finer points to the pundits.

After all, I’m just a simple economist who talks to Burt Reynolds impersonators at farm shows…and smokes cigars to counterbalance the ill effects of eggnog.

Give ‘em hell, Kirby!