Georgia-Hawaii makes it interesting for Sugar Bowl

NEW ORLEANS -- A Georgia fan, loaded on something, perhaps bourbon, brushed a Hawaii fan on Bourbon Street late Sunday night.

“You ain’t ever seen anything like our defense!” the guy screamed in between expletives. “We are going to kick your . . . “

Really, what is Hawaii doing here?

Don’t the Warriors know they’re up against a top-dog team from the best college football conference, the Southeastern, ever conceived?

Coach June Jones joked that tonight’s Sugar Bowl between Hawaii (12-0) and Georgia (10-2) at the Superdome was basically the Bad News Bears versus Bad News.

“We have to play like we belong,” Jones said Monday.

Any doubt the SEC is/was the nation’s best conference was put to rest when the league flexed its mighty muscles this season and finished first in every Bowl Championship Series computer index.

The Pacific 10 thought it had something going -- but it didn’t, or maybe you missed the Holiday and Las Vegas bowls.

To illustrate just how tough the SEC is, Georgia didn’t even win it. Yet, a lot of people think the Bulldogs should be playing for the national title in next week’s game at the Superdome.

Georgia has won six straight games and its two losses were to other SEC teams, so those setbacks are put in a separate category known as “eating your own.”

The Bulldogs’ offense is a model of balance and precision and their beefy linemen will be looking down at Hawaii’s.

Georgia has passed for 2,404 yards and rushed for 2,145, with a freshman tailback, Knowshon Moreno, who has been compared to Herschel Walker, who led Georgia to the national title in the 1981 Sugar Bowl.

Hawaii has won 13 straight but try saying that to an SEC fan with a straight face. The Warriors are the 100-pound weaklings of scheduling. Hawaii needed overtime to beat Louisiana Tech and a last-second field goal to outlast Nevada, which got blown off the field in its bowl game by New Mexico.

And Hawaii’s offense is about as lopsided as a fun-house mirror.

The Warriors boast a quarterback, Colt Brennan, three speedy receivers and four running backs that could be in witness protection. Hawaii has passed for 5,402 yards this season and rushed for 949 -- an average of 79.1 a game.

Jones described his running attack as “we throw the ball, catch it, and then we run after the catch.”

Any disciple of serious football knows you can’t be great without balance and a stalwart defense, and Hawaii has neither.

But Hawaii vs. Georgia is one reason why people purchase 58-inch plasma screens. Sometimes the most interesting games are the ones in which the outcome seems so predetermined.

Think of what a Hawaii upset might mean. It could set SEC trash talk back 20 years. Chat rooms south of the Mason-Dixon line would close down.

A Georgia loss tonight might even diminish a Louisiana State victory next week in the BCS title game, as in “Big deal, Georgia still lost to Hawaii.”

A Hawaii win would be more upsetting than Boise State’s win over Oklahoma in last season’s Fiesta Bowl if only because Big 12 fans don’t think about their football the way SEC fans do.

A Georgia fan could no longer walk down Bourbon Street spouting the things he did, because all you’d have to do to shut the guy up is to say “Hawaii.”

So, Hawaii over Georgia, is there any chance?

It’s difficult to imagine Hawaii playing in the SEC and getting out with fewer than four losses, yet impossible things have been known to happen in 60-minute bowl spurts.

Hawaii might just be screwy enough to pose a threat. The team is an outfit of misfits, “a melting pot in the Pacific,” as Brennan puts it. What other quarterback from California calls the offensive plays in Samoan?

Georgia won’t soon again see a team with more hair coming out of its collective helmet.

Don’t discount, Brennan says, the “why-not-us?” component.

“Everyone has come up with an excuse as to why we are not a great football team,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any more excuses after this football game.”

Jones is Hawaii’s nonconformist coach, a former NFL outcast whose run-and-shoot philosophies were ridiculed because the system dared not feature a tight end. However, in the college game, where the talent gaps are pronounced, the kitchen-sink concept is about the only chance a Hawaii has against a Georgia.

“I think that if you were to line up in the I-formation their speed and power would overwhelm us,” Jones said. “Because of what we do offensively and Colt’s quick release, we have a chance.”

Two years ago in the Sugar Bowl, West Virginia threw its spread offense at Georgia and it was 28-0 before the Bulldogs showed any bark, only to still lose, 38-35.

“I think what happened was we had not seen that type of offense before,” Georgia Coach Mark Richt said of that game. “And we did not fully understand how fast and talented those guys were.”

Richt doesn’t think his team will get surprised again.

But hasn’t this season already been full of them?

chris.dufresne@latimes.com