Two days after Georgia finished its home schedule last season, about a dozen workers entered Sanford Stadium and removed hundreds of hedges that surround the field.
Construction on the west end zone required a crane as long as a football field, and the hedges lining the south sideline and west end zone needed to go. Privet hedges have encompassed the field at Sanford Stadium for 88 years. They had been replaced just once.
For a day and a half, employees from Laserturf SE, a landscaping company Georgia has worked with for decades, labeled every hedge, pulled them from the earth and transferred each one to its own 20-gallon barrel.