Image credit: ducksizedhorses via reddit.com/r/uga

Like the Force, Flagpole's man-crush on University of Georgia wide receiver Chris Conley grows stronger every day.

The self-described nerd recently sat down with the Macon Telegraph's Seth Emerson to talk… and talk… and talk about his Star Wars fandom and plans to shoot an epic light saber duel on campus sometime next year—co-starring teammate Todd Gurley, no less. (Please don't tear an ACL trying to pull some Yoda shit.)

Conley's favorite installment of the dual trilogies is The Empire Strikes Back (isn't everyone's?) but then his opinions get a little more controversial: He rates Revenge of the Sith (OK…) and Return of the Jedi (wait, what?) ahead of A New Hope.

To each his own, I suppose. He does acknowledge the generation gap. And it's not going to make the light saber duel any less awesome.

Q: Where do things stand with what you're trying to organize?

Conley: Right now it's kind of difficult because everyone's not back on campus. But we shot an effects demo live three days ago. Frank Martin's actually editing that stuff and he's doing some special effects just to see what we're good at, and to see what we can do. And so we can get a more appropriate timetable. Right now the university's asking us how many days we need to shoot, and how big our crew is going to be. We will be sending them that information once we get more people back on campus, and we talk to some more people. We're gonna have a meeting to let people know how they can be involved.

The script is written. Story boards are pretty much done at this point. And I'm casting two actors to play two roles that we need, and then once we get that done, there'll be two steps: Choreography and shooting.

Q: Are you in it?

Conley: Yeah.

Q: Who are you?

Conley: I can't tell you yet.

Q: So this is your own story.

Conley: Yeah. It's not a huge story. The majority of it is a duel. But there's a little bit of a story to set the duel up.