Bulldogs can't lose for winning
Georgia fights a stacked deck to beat Texas in the SEC championship and now sets its sights on the College Football Playoff.
The distinguishing characteristic of Kirby Smart, Georgia’s football coach, is a hearing defect. He cannot absorb the word “no,” especially when it comes from a prominent high school player. He is the recruiting personification of UGA himself, a purebred Bulldog who is placid in most of his dealings but relentless when it comes to sinking his teeth into the cuffs of your trousers.
There were 58 Georgia players on NFL rosters, including practice squads, when the season began. There are only 32 NFL teams. Ten Bulldogs have gone in the first round of the past three NFL drafts, and 33 overall. Not all of them have been replaced completely, since they don’t put out yearly models of Brock Bowers and Jalen Carter as if they were F-150s, and this particular Georgia team has warts and indentations that the past three have not. But when the second half comes around and there’s a point to prove or a game to win, the Bulldogs are just as hard of hearing as their coach. “No” is not an operating policy.
Georgia’s 22-19 overtime win over Texas in Saturday’s SEC Championship did not really affect the most important worldwide news of the weekend, at least everywhere but Damascus. Both teams are safely in the 12-team College Football Playoff. All that mattered was seeding and scheduling. The winner wouldn’t play for three weeks and the loser would be pressed into action in two, although it would get a home game. Who knows if that will be an advantage or not? Getting the bye hasn’t been helpful in the expanded baseball playoffs. A three-week break is unnatural. But, unlike most other sports, you have to put football players back together again, and the downtime should reduce most contusions.
As a dogged skeptic of the 12-team format and a mourner of the loss of the 4-team playoff, I thought the conference title games would fade into dress rehearsals if both teams were qualifiers. There was some of that in Oregon’s Big 10 win over Penn State, where tackling was optional. But the SEC Just Means More, as it keeps telling us, and Georgia and Texas went at it like the loser was going to prison.
But, as Smart said, it took the fans a while to bring it. “It’s going to be interesting, the direction of college football, because I hate to say it, but I didn’t think early in pregame that the game had the same juice,” Smart said. “I don’t know if that’s because Georgia fans know where to tailgate (at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta), they’re hanging on outside because they’ve been here seven straight years. So the atmosphere improved. But it wasn’t as electric early. I think the game made it more electric because it was a great game.
“I value SEC championships. I hold them in high esteem, because the work required is incredible.”
And since Georgia had played an 8-overtime game with Georgia Tech eight days earlier, and since quarterback Carson Beck had to leave at halftime with a grotesquely twisted passing arm, it seemed that the incentive structure favored Texas, as did first-half performance. In the first half alone the Longhorns snapped the ball 27 times on Georgia’s side of the field. It walked into the locker room with a mere 6-3 lead, despite winning the yardage 260-54.
But Beck couldn’t grip the football. The next-quarterback-up was Gunner Stockton, a sophomore from the north Georgia municipality of Tiger, Ga., population 426. Stockton put Tiger more firmly on the map at Rabun County High, running and passing for 254 touchdowns, which broke Trevor Lawrence’s state record. He first chose South Carolina, but Smart didn’t hear him.
It has nothing to do with his name, but Gunner and his high school teammates would watch film on Sunday morning wearing camo. When the projector went off, they went hunting. He and safety Dan Jackson, a walk-on who has become one of Georgia’s more prominent earhole-hunters, take lucky contest winners on duck expeditions whenever time permits. Stockton reserves his current Sundays for armed walks in the woods with his grandfather, Joe Dinkins.
On Saturday he couldn’t afford any misfires. He went 12-for-16 instead, and Georgia began to awaken. He also had a pretty good wingman in Trevor Etienne, whose brother Travis played expertly for Clemson and now the Jacksonville Jaguars. Trevor, who transferred from Florida, wasn’t supposed to play with bad ribs, but he told the team beforehand that he’d always wanted to play in a Just Means More bowl. Here, he ran 10 yards to finish the initial third quarter drive and put Georgia up 10-6.
The Longhorns began to realize that Georgia can’t be allowed to linger. Quintrevion Wisner, who had set personal bests in his past two Texas games, got only 65 yards in 19 carries. Texas was outrushed 141–31, although colleges still count sack yardage in the rushing category, and Georgia sacked Quinn Ewers six times. Bert Auburn also missed two field goals for the ‘Horns.
But stuff kept happening to Georgia. Punter Brett Thorson hurt his knee. He’s also the holder for placekicks. The second-string holder? That was Beck.
So when Smart faced a fourth-and-five on the Georgia 30, with the game tied in the fourth quarter, a fake punt was definitely in mind. Why this didn’t occur to Texas is another question they’re asking in Austin, along with “Why is Matthew McConaughey on the sideline?”
The upback, Drew Bobo, got the snap and shoveled it to Arian Smith, who gained nine yards. Bobo’s dad is Mike Bobo, the offensive coordinator and a former Georgia quarterback. “Drew’s got a better completion percentage,” Smart observed.
The drive stalled out on the Texas 3-yard-line. Who’s going to hold for Peyton Woodring’s kick? Stockton did. The 21-yarder put the Bulldogs up 16-13.
Ewers then threw a pick to Daylen Everette, who had two of those and was the game’s MVP. But Stockton, in his one hiccup, gave it right back with an interception to Jahdae Barron with 2:30 left.
Ewers got Texas to the Georgia 14 but took a sack from Mykel Williams, who will be joining the Dogs’ NFL auxiliary at some point, and threw incomplete twice. Auburn’s field goal tied it and brought on overtime.
Ewers then went one-for-five on the first OT drive, after NIL All-American Arch Manning ran for five yards on the first play. Auburn’s field goal put Texas up 19-16 but also left the Longhorns vulnerable. Stockton hit his first three passes, including a third-down shot to Oscar Delp, and, on second-and-eight, saw a hole up the middle and tried to fill it himself. Andrew Mukuba of the Longhorns closed that hole and also Stockton’s eyes with a thunderous but legal hit that removed Stockton’s helmet. But the kid got the first down on the four-yard-line.
Here came Beck, his arm dangling. Throwing, unless it came from someone else, was an impossibility. So Etienne burrowed his way through the loaded box anyway for the touchdown that will go into Bulldog lore right next to freshman Nate Frazier’s score that had beaten Tech, on the other side of midnight, the week before.
Georgia is 11-2 against the saltiest schedule in the nation. Only the Bulldogs had to play Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas in the regular season, and they met (and thrashed) Clemson in the season opener. They lost a close one to Alabama, with another second-half comeback that fell short, and they were handled, 28-10, by Ole Miss. Unlike the 2022 team, which basically won the national championship game by running onto the field against TCU, Georgia did not scare its way to this point. It had to duck and dodge and dredge up every resource.
And even though it’s evident that Oregon is the best team in the country by several lengths, and that the larger playoff is a victory for the moneychangers alone, the Bulldogs’ ability to win three more games should not be doubted. Certainly they haven’t heard otherwise.