TUA-TIMER?
Ga. eyes revenge vs. ’Bama QB
Georgia seemed poised to win its first national championship in nearly four decades. Kirby Smart was going to be the first Nick Saban protégé to beat his mentor.
Then, on that January night, Tua Tagovailoa, a relative unknown true freshman at the time, was given the ball. Everything from that point on changed.
Alabama rallied from 13 points down to win its fifth crown in 11 years under Saban. Tagovailoa led the Crimson Tide to one of the most dominant regular seasons in college football history this year en route to what should be a runaway Heisman Trophy vote.
In the SEC championship game Saturday afternoon at MercedesBenz Stadium in Atlanta — the same place where Georgia was left heartbroken in overtime on Tagovailoa’s championship-winning 41-yard touchdown nearly 11 months ago — the Bulldogs get a chance to right that wrong.
They get the chance to play their way back into the playoff, to make the OklahomaOhio State debate moot and to earn a shot at that elusive title.
“I think anybody that came back and didn’t go on to the next level that didn’t have to, really expected this,” Georgia defensive end Jonathan Ledbetter said this week. “We have unfinished business and we intend to go ahead and handle that.”
It will, of course, be a tall task. The Bulldogs (11-1) are 12 ¹/2-point underdogs, expected by some to be the latest in a string of blowout victims by Saban’s juggernaut.
Top-ranked Alabama’s closest game this year was a 22-point win over Texas A&M. Its average scoring margin was 35.2. It is scoring 49 points per game, gaining 538 yards per game and picking up 8.04 yards per play, all school records. The defense, overshadowed by Tagovailoa and the offense’s brilliance, only allows 13.8 points per game, third-fewest in the country.
Fourth-ranked Georgia, meanwhile, is not the same team that seemed to have Alabama (12-0) beaten last January before being outscored 26-10 with Tagovaiola under center in the 26-23 loss. The Bulldogs were manhandled by threeloss LSU on Oct. 13, and last year’s stars, Nick Chubb, Sony Michel and Roquan Smith, won’t be around to help.
“I guess you could argue if it had been Tua for the whole game, would it have been like that?” said Smart, an assistant under Saban at Alabama for nine years before taking over at Georgia in 2016. “That’s a realist thinking and a realist talking.”
Georgia is entering this showdown playing its best football. Since the defeat to LSU, the Bulldogs have won five straight games, by a cumulative 208-92.
They are averaging 306.8 rushing yards per game in that stretch, buoyed by the emergence of the 1-2 running back tandem of D’Andre Swift and Elijah Holyfield, the kind of clock-control ground game needed to keep Tagovailoa and his explosive unit off the f ield.
The unit is actually averaging 1.4 yards more per carry than it did last year, when current NFL running backs Chubb and Michel were in the backfield.