You remember it, don’t you? The 2008 SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament? If you’re having trouble picturing it, maybe this will help. Remember when a tornado hit the Georgia Dome and nearly took the roof off the place? Yeah, you do.

Well, this week is the 15th anniversary of that crazy, chaotic and classic tournament. A weekend of rare events happening with regularity, the tourney began on March 13, 2008 and concluded on March 16, 2008.

The two rarest-of-rare things that happened: First, a tornado actually landed in downtown Atlanta and it actually ripped right over the Georgia Dome. Secondly, the University of Georgia basketball team won the thing, despite being the longest shot in the 12-team, single-elimination bracket.

To help commemorate and celebrate “The Dream Dawgs” team and its remarkable accomplishment, Connect Savannah spoke with two of the players on that UGA squad to get their thoughts on all of it 15 years later.

“Leading into that thing, we weren’t playing well at all,” said Zac Swansey during a March 10 phone conversation with Connect Savannah. “You just won’t see the kind of thing we did in today’s basketball. I doubt if it will ever happen again. Looking back, it’s crazy to even think about it. But while you’re in it – while you’re playing – you just don’t think about that kind of thing.”

Swansey, now 34, was a freshman point guard on that UGA team. He wound up making one of the biggest shots in Georgia history during that ‘08 tournament. He wouldn’t have the opportunity to make that shot had the tornado not hit. And the Bulldogs wouldn’t have even been in the city of Atlanta had it not been for a game-winner two days prior from senior co-captain Dave Bliss.

Bliss, 36, spoke with CS over the phone from Oklahoma City on March 13.

“A lot of stuff has been written (about the UGA team at the SEC Tournament), but I think the biggest thing was that we had felt a little bit disappointed about the way our regular season had ended,” he said. “I thought we had a better team than what our record showed or maybe what some of the numbers showed.”

What the numbers showed was not great. And that may be putting it mildly.

Entering the tournament, Georgia was the lowest-seeded team in the field. The Bulldogs were the six-seed from the six-team Eastern Division. They had lost 11 of 13 games to finish the regular season and they sported a 13-16 overall record with a 4-12 mark in SEC play. They were ranked 193rd in the country in points per game and 138th in points allowed. 

Head coach Dennis Felton was going to be fired and the program was going to be ready to rid themselves of the 2007-08 season for good.

“We all knew what the deal was with Coach," Swansey said. "If we didn't win, he was getting fired. He knew it and we knew it."

"But he never put that on us," Bliss said. "He was a true professional and he knew what he was doing."

It was a season that none of them would want to remember. And, had it been a scripted event. Georgia’s role would have called for a one-and-done. A background actor with a scene or maybe two. Then, they would kindly exit stage left to make room for the A-listers. But Felton’s Bulldogs improvised, went off-script.

They were suddenly the stars on a bizarre reality show with a shocking ending.

After winning two games in the previous 35 days, they won four games in four days and three in 30 hours. A moment in time wherein the Georgia basketball Bulldogs were, somehow, the best story in sports. From worst to first. From extras to headliners and from the back page to the front.

“When people think about UGA basketball, or at least that tenure of it,” Swansey said. “I feel like that weekend is still what stands out to most of them.”

It all started on the night of March 13 in the Georgia Dome. Georgia was set to play the final game of the first round against Mississippi. Five days prior, the Bulldogs had lost by 14 points (76-62) to the Rebels in Athens at Stegeman Coliseum.

This time around, Georgia won, 97-95 in overtime. Bliss banked-in a short jumper as time expired and sent Georgia to the second round on Friday night. There, UGA would go up against mighty Kentucky.

As Georgia and Kentucky sat in the bowels of the Georgia Dome on Friday night (March 14) waiting to take the court for the Day 2 nightcap, Mississippi State and Alabama were playing on the court above. It was 9:41 p.m. when the game stopped in its tracks. A rumbling, shaking unsettling feeling swept through the Dome.

Nobody inside knew it at the time, but a tornado was above the Georgia Dome, ripping and roaring its way across the roof while causing about $1.8 million worth of damage to the dome and hundreds of millions more across metro Atlanta. The storm resulted in one fatality, although not at the dome.

“An unbelievable sound that sounds like a train riding over the top of the Georgia Dome. The entire building froze,” said Joe Dean Jr., who was on color commentary duty alongside play-by-play man Tim Brando on the television broadcast. “Everybody stopped; the officials, the players, the crowd and everybody looked up. Scaffolding was swaying back and forth, lights were swaying and it was very scary. Nobody really knew what to do.”

How rare was this? Pretty, pretty rare.

“More than 90 percent of the tornadoes that hit America are in rural areas that no one ever sees. So, to get one to hit in a populated, downtown area, is very rare,” said meteorologist Paul Ossmann.

The Kentucky Wildcats and the Georgia Bulldogs were set to play the final game of the night at the Georgia Dome, but that would not happen.

“We didn’t hear anything. We were stuck for like 20 minutes with managers running back and forth to let us know what was going on. I thought the tornado probably passed and that we’d come out and play,” said Patrick Patterson, a freshman big-man for Kentucky that season.

“But time just kept going and going. We were all anxious to get out there. We were all trying to go back (to the hotel) to sleep, but coach (Billy Gillispie) said we had to stay down there until we got the call saying what to do.”

Georgia’s other senior captain, point guard Sundiata Gaines, expressed similar thoughts of confusion when he talked with Chip Towers of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution about it years later.

“We’re just sitting in there waiting to play and somebody came in and told us that a tornado had hit the arena and they were evacuating, but just to sit tight,” said Gaines. “In my mind I’m thinking, ‘We need to get out of this arena.’ But they were saying the safest place for us at the time was in that locker room.”

Neither the Wildcats or the Bulldogs got back to their hotel rooms until well after midnight. Even then, while Patterson and the ‘cats were getting their Zzzz’s, the Bulldogs were wide awake.

“We were just trying to stay ready, and sort of wrap your head around what was happening,” Bliss, who was sharing a hotel room with Swansey, said. “We didn’t know anything for the longest time. We were just waiting and waiting.”

Swansey recalls the moment they finally learned something.

“I remember Coach Felton called a team meeting well after midnight just to say ‘Hey, we’re playing at 11 o’clock in the morning (at Georgia Tech) and if we win that one, we play again at six,” said Swansey. “At that time, I’m like what in the world is going on here? Two games in one day? At Tech and against Kentucky?”

The next morning, Georgia and Kentucky played in front of roughly one thousand fans as well as a few hundred more who found their way inside of Alexander Memorial Coliseum through various nooks and crannies.

“They said it was like 800 people,” Bliss said while laughing at the thought. “It was more than that, but definitely lots more outside.”

The fans outside missed a classic, one in which Georgia won 60-56 in another overtime game. It was the first time Georgia men’s basketball team beat Kentucky in the SEC Tournament. It came courtesy of Swansey’s unlikely turnaround three-pointer at the buzzer. It shocked the sport’s most storied program, and sent notice to the UGA faithful that they now had to clear their schedules for Saturday night.

Georgia, yes that Georgia, was in the SEC Basketball semifinals.

The Bulldogs would go on to beat Mississippi State, 64-60, another slugfest likely aiding the Dawgs because Mississippi State was likely preparing to play Kentucky. Instead, they got Bliss and the boys. On Sunday afternoon and on National Television, the Dawgs beat Arkansas, 66-57 in the title tilt to complete their March  miracle.

Now what?

“So we stayed at Georgia Tech and cut the nets down at the court,” Swansey said of the hours immediately following the championship game. “We watched the Selection Sunday show on their big screen on their court too. Then, when we got back to Athens, we had no idea what we were walking into. The students had flooded the area around Stegeman and it felt like it was going to be the start of something new at Georgia.”

Bliss remembered it simply: “Yeah, it was a lot of fun those few days. Good weather and good feelings and finally a good basketball team. We were still working (on Xavier), but we knew then that it was something special I think.”

Well, it was certainly special, but it wouldn’t mark the beginning of a golden era for Georgia basketball like some had hoped.

Felton kept his job after the season, but was fired the next year by then UGA Athletics Director Damon Evans. Bliss and Gaines moved on (both to brief professional careers and Bliss is now in the coaching field) after the team lost (73-61) to 3-seeded Xavier in the NCAA first round game on March 20, 2008.

And so, as quickly as they had jumped onto the national stage, they had exited at their own pace, on their own time. But just like that, their run was over.The Bulldogs have not even advanced past the quarterfinals of the SEC Tournament.

Still, Swansey, Bliss, Gaines and the rest of the 2007-08 Georgia Bulldogs will long hold a special place in the hearts and minds of Bulldog nation. They, and a tornado, are lasting proof that indeed, anything is possible.

“It’s cool that you get to kind of inspire people still even all these years later,” Bliss said. “I still think about every year when the SEC Tournament time comes around.”

What they did that weekend won’t ever happen again. A last place team in a conference winning four games in a row – and two in one day – to win the tourney title. It’s the stuff that Dreams are made of. And for that special moment in time, it was the stuff that the “Dream Dawgs” were made of.

“It was a wild ride and I’m just so grateful to have been a part of something like that,” said Swansey. “By far the best athletic accomplishment of my life.” 

This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2023.