Seems to me like you have a healthy attitude so, my posts really aren't directed towards you.
A self destructive attitude is to prefer beating UGA than win a conference championship, or lose every game if it means we beat UGA.
My premise is that this sort attitude filters down to the field of play. A good example is how fans respond to coaches who are trying to maintain the focus of their student athletes.
At pressers, I watch our coaches, who are striving for consistency in effort and focus from their players, dance around the expectation that there is another gear for the UGA contests. It is as if it is okay to acknowledge that they prepared less for Carolina than UGA!
Pastner, early in his tenure, made the mistake to say in response to an upcoming UGA contest that he wanted to win every game and prepared maximally for them all. That wasn't popular.
But I don't think that coaches can insulate the players from counter-productive pressures exerted by an unbalanced Tech community over these contests.
GT athletics is not irrevocably tied to UGA. There is a weird co-dependency thing, specifically from Tech fans, about the rivalry. It is as if Gt fans seem to think of UGA as inevitable as the other side of a coin.
The day the Tech community believes that they have a healthy identity independent of UGA is the day we start to beat them.