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INGLEWOOD, Calif. – A rainy day in Los Angeles seemed like a good time to go inside an art exhibit, and 72,628 ended up doing so Monday, whether they ended up delighted or dejected. They saw the hard-hitting art of American football calibrated to one of its greatest levels in the 153 years since a bunch of thugs started it on a brazen field in New Jersey.
They watched Georgia, the American dynasty of the moment, take on a deserving group of TCU Horned Frogs, pound them 65-7 inside SoFi Stadium and turn them into something that looked a lot like a dam. They saw Georgia claim the first repeat national championship of the College Football Playoff era (and first overall in 10 years), become the fourth team to go 15-0 and go 29-1 in two seasons between which the NFL went late. April attacked his roster with 15 players, including five defenders in the first round of the draft.
They saw collaborative greatness even if they didn’t see competitive drama.
“I hope [Georgia fans] I understand the message that I’m about to say,” said Kirby Smart, the seventh-year Georgia coach, former Georgia player and Georgia’s top man. “They can’t take it for granted. You can’t take opportunities like this for granted. And they showed up in full force. And it’s better that they never get tired because we need them.”
Two thousand miles from Athens, Georgia, they saw things they might never tire of. They watched as a gritty Bulldogs group peppered the field with both the fancy plays and the less-than-stellar stops needed to elevate their college football to some of the best it’s ever seen. Nine days after a 42-41 upset of Ohio State in a Peach Bowl national semifinal, they saw a precious rush that led TCU coach Sonny Dykes to detect “a lot of pride in the his performance in his way of playing”.
They saw something, really something, reminiscent of others who decorated their back-to-back titles with games, like Nebraska in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl (62-24) or Alabama in the 2013 Bowl Championship Series title game (42 -14) and saw reinforcement of the stark reality that the best American football comes from the Southeast, the region of eight consecutive national championships from four different universities.
As it happened: Blow-by-blow of the Bulldogs’ loss
Since Monday night, Georgia’s players have been running on open prairies of their own making and reflecting their own variety of threats, from 25-year-old quarterback Stetson Bennett IV running through open space to a 21-yard touchdown run. that opened the scoring, until Ladd McConkey caught a 37-yard touchdown pass from Bennett in which McConkey ran so calmly he looked a little lonely, to tight end Brock Bowers making precise catches of precise throws for racking up seven catches for 152 yards and a masterful third-quarter touchdown.
If you needed Georgia to show he could run the field in a hurry, he could do it, with plays like four for 70 yards, five for 57 or four for 55. If you needed that to show he could run effectively. , could do it, with 11 plays for 92 yards or 11 plays for 66 yards. If you wanted schemes that left people open, they had them, and if you wanted precision passes like Bennett’s 22-yard touchdown pass to a well-guarded Adonai Mitchell that made it 38-7 at halftime, they had them.
“[They] just run our misalignments and we keep scoring,” TCU linebacker Dee Winters said. “We keep hitting each other, overthinking, trying to run to the ball too fast and stuff like that nature”.
In defense of this defense, people often suffer from personality disturbances in the presence of greatness. Georgia racked up 589 yards on a handsome 254 (ground) and 335 (air), and Bennett floated in the quarterback clouds all game long before landing a delirious 226.9, which Smart called ‘”amazing” and “probably the best game of his career,” and Bennett went 18-for-25 for 304 yards and four touchdowns, rushed for 39 and two more scores, and won his second Offensive MVP consecutive in the national title games.
“And,” Smart said, “when you have a quarterback who can run the protections and check things and know what the defense is doing, but still beats you with your feet, you have a high-level quarterback.”
Stetson Bennett always had star potential. Just ask the Georgia scouting team.
This is a high-profile Georgia quarterback who walked on at Georgia in 2017, transferred from Georgia to a Mississippi college in 2018, and then transferred back to Georgia in 2019, though his own coaches banded together to get him overlooked. Then, all these years later, he’s a two-time title quarterback who spent his final college quarter on the sidelines with quiet nervous endings after Smart called a timeout to give Bennett a curtain call of which Bennett said: “The meeting, I said to all the guys, ‘What are we doing? Why don’t we do a play?’ Then he understood the reason and became excited “at the meeting, as simple as it is, just one last meeting with the boys, you know?”
All the while, though, something just as artistic happened elsewhere in the game’s stats, even if it was the bruise-inducing kind of art. A TCU (13-2) team that only once gained fewer than 377 yards in a game during its torrid season suddenly gained 188. A darling of an unlikely finisher who rushed for 263 yards in a dream Fiesta Bowl semifinal victory over Michigan suddenly rushed for 36. Where 32 good first downs were to Georgia, nine of the knotty ones were to TCU. TCU’s top player, wide receiver Quentin Johnston, caught a pass for three yards. A portentous early rush saw TCU star quarterback Max Duggan with a tough committee of defenders around him: Jalen Carter, Nazir Stackhouse and Smael Mondon.
“I mean, they were good up front,” Duggan said. “They had some good blitzes, some good passing pressures. I held the ball a little too long, I wasn’t making the reads, I was causing problems for the offensive line. It was kind of on me. But . . .”
But: “They had some good schemes.”
Brewer: TCU was a deserving finalist and college football is better with variety
“As a kid, you know, you always dream about moments like this,” said Georgia defensive end Javon Bullard, who intercepted two passes.
It all sent former linebacker and defensive line coach Smart into a near soliloquy on his defensive scout team, and it all looked like TCU had run into something bigger, faster and more powerful than it had seen. It’s something that reigns — and rains red-and-black — over football country now, 81-15 in seven seasons for Smart, the former Georgia linebacker who once coordinated the defense of another dynasty , Alabama. His latest Georgia team would find “a consistency of performance [that] it’s hard to find,” Smart said, and would express admiration for it. And those who watch Georgia, especially Georgia red and black, would know they’ve seen a level rare in all the years of art.
“It seems like for the last three or four months,” Bennett said, “we’ve been looking to see if anybody can beat us and we’ve run out of games.”
And then he finished, “Nobody could.”