On the last day of football preseason training, questions are still swirling about how the team will fare this year.

For an answer, a look through the eyes of the man who coached the Bulldogs for 25 years and has watched from the sideline for 20 more: former University football coach and Athletic Director Vince Dooley.

“I think our team will surprise a lot of people,” Dooley said. “I used to always say there were two things you wanted to do. One is to win the championship. If you can’t win the championship, do better than what you’re supposed to do. If you do one of those two things, you’ll make everybody happy.”

Dooley said the two goals could apply to this year’s team, but the first option may be tough to do for now.

This year’s team suffers from lowered expectations, no doubt tied to the loss of the three players featured on last year’s Sports Illustrated cover.

But Dooley doesn’t seem to be worried – he’s seen all this before. He said it reminded him of 1983, the year after Herschel Walker left and the most successful period in the University’s football history.

That year the Bulldogs were starting anew after losing just three games in the previous three seasons. They were ranked at a relatively low No. 14 in the preseason AP poll. But Dooley said he and his coaches used the loss of Herschel Walker as a strength.

“I think it’s a rallying point,” he said. “Losing Herschel brought everybody closer together, and that was a very, very close football team.”

He said the closeness was a direct result of the race to replace the lost leaders. But he said they had more to worry about than losing a star player.

“We didn’t really have a super quarterback, but we had a quarterback that was a winner,” Dooley said of John Lastinger.

Dooley described some of Lastinger’s throws that year as ending up in the ground, some up in the stadium.

In the end, the ’83 team went through the season with one tie and one loss – to Auburn. They went to the Cotton Bowl, where they faced an undefeated Texas team that beat Auburn and stood ready to claim the National Title with a win over Georgia.

Georgia beat Texas and ended the season with a No. 4 ranking.

Dooley remembers the team with fondness.

“It was kind of a no-name football team in a lot of respects,” he said. “[Yet] they had tremendous success, and are always a very special team to me.”

Editor’s note: Originally slated to run last week, this is the second part of Marc McAfee’s August 12 interview with Vince Dooley.