WALK-ON AIR
QB Bennett completes climb to unlikely Georgia hero
THE game was over, the championship clinched. Kelee Ringo had just picked off the final important pass of Bryce Young’s brilliant season, run it back 79 yards, and the Georgia Bulldogs were going to end a 41year drought, would finally escape the grip of Alabama’s band of crimson bogeymen.
Now, all at once, the moment finally overtook a 23-year-old football player named Stetson Bennett IV. All at once Bennett — the best story in this college football season — began to weep on the sideline. He looked at the scoreboard and saw the evidence of what he and his teammates had done — Georgia 33, Alabama 18 — and that’s all it took.
“It just hit me,” he would say a few minutes later, confetti falling all around him, a young boy’s dream officially springing to life in bright, vivid color and deafening resolution. “Good Lord. Wow.”
As a boy in Blackshear, Ga., Bennett had dreamed the dream so many kids in so many forgotten quarters of the Peach State do: leading the Bulldogs to glory for the first time since Herschel Walker was a freshman. He has spent so much of his career in Athens either unwanted, overlooked or underappreciated. That will no longer be the case. Stetson Fleming Bennett IV will never again have to pay for a meal, for a beer, for a bottle of wine anywhere within the state borders. This one will be forever. This one will be eternal. The Bulldogs looked like they were about to lose another big game to the Crimson Tide, and Bennett was a big reason why.
And then — in what felt like an eyeblink — the game turned upside down.
Bennett turned it upside down. “I wasn’t going to be the reason we lost,” Bennett said. “I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
That was the darkest moment. That’s when the Georgia faction of sold-out Lucas Oil Stadium began to wonder if maybe they weren’t destined to spend one more season followed by a dark cloud. The Bulldogs clung to a 13-12 lead, early in the fourth, the game a throwback rock fight between the SEC’s two most glamorous programs.
Then, Bennett was pressured in the pocket. He tried to get rid of the ball, and it sure looked in real time — and on more than a few replays — that he had merely thrown an incomplete pass. But the officials ruled otherwise: They called it a fumble. Alabama’s Brian Branch recovered with his foot a millimeter inbounds. And four plays later Young found tight end Cameron Latu in the end zone.
It was there that you could almost hear college football settle back onto its axis: Bama was ahead. Surely, Nick Saban’s crew would figure out a way to finish off his eighth national championship, seventh at Alabama. All they had to do was contain Bennett, who has spent his entire career hearing people pine for someone else, anyone else, other than No. 13.
It was on Bennett now. All of it. Game. Season. Championship.
“I had to. Otherwise, we were going to lose,” he said. “I said, ‘I’ve got to fix this.’ ”
He fixed it. You bet he did. The Bulldogs got the ball back, and Bennett started throwing the ball with more confidence than he had all night: 18 yards to Jermaine Burton; 10 yards to Kenny McIntosh. He targeted Burton again, and a pass interference brought them 15 yards closer. A sack pushed them back to the Bama 40 — Bennett held onto the ball for dear life.
And so it was: second-and-18. Just over eight minutes left. Bennett began his career at Georgia as a preferred walk-on, ran the scout team and shared a locker. He transferred to a junior college in Mississippi. He was recruited to play at Louisiana, but then Kirby Smart made a scholarship offer. He would arrive buried, again, on the depth chart. Smart kept recruiting over him. Bennett stayed. In his heart, he always was the kid from Blackshear, born to be a Bulldog.
And now, he dropped back. There was a flag — Alabama had jumped offside, free play. There was a key block. Bennett heaved the ball as far as he could. And about 49 yards away, the ball dropped into Adonai Mitchell’s arms in the back of the end zone. Georgia had the lead. Bennett added another short TD pass one possession later.
Then, Ringo picked off Young. And the moment finally tackled Stetson Bennett harder than any Alabama defender had all night. In that moment, it was impossible not to paraphrase the famous line from Hoosiers — “This is for all the walk-ons who never got a chance …”
Only this was real life. And Bennett said it better.
“I hope it gives someone a little hope,” he said. “Keep your mouth shut, work hard. Life is tough. Work through it.”
The quarterback wasn’t supposed to be good enough. The coach couldn’t win the big game.
Together, they smashed those narratives to pieces, Stetson Bennett IV and Kirby Smart snapping Georgia’s national championship drought.
Bennett outplayed Bryce Young, the Heisman Trophy winner. Smart got the better of his former boss, Nick Saban, the record-holder for national titles. And the Bulldogs won it all for the first time since 1980, slaying their Crimson Tide demons after seven consecutive defeats with a thrilling 33-18 victory at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The 2017 team, which blew a 10point, fourth-quarter lead to Alabama in the national championship game, can rest easy.
“There’s going to be some property torn up in Indianapolis tonight, baby,” a jubilant Smart said, echoing the call made by the late Georgia play-by-play man Larry Munson after the Bulldogs won it all in 1980.
Bennett, a one-time walk-on and junior college quarterback who started this season as the backup, threw two touchdown passes in the final 8:09, responding like a champion after his fumble enabled Alabama to go ahead. The starstudded defense produced a resounding performance just over a month after getting shredded by the Crimson Tide (13-2). It picked off Young twice, the first multipleinterception game of his young career, held Alabama to just one touchdown in four trips into the red zone and Kelee Ringo iced it with his 79-yard interception return for a touchdown. As that play unfolded, an emotional Bennett began tearing up. He was 54 seconds away from being a champion.
“I wasn’t going to be the reason why we lost this game,” he said. “It’s the thing that Coach Smart and the whole team has been preaching all year: resiliency, toughness, composure, connection. I knew that those guys beside me had my back, and I had their back, too.”
Bennett became the starter when J.T. Daniels suffered a lat injury early in the season, and never gave up the job. He faced steady criticism, none more so than after last month’s SEC Championship game when he threw a pair of interceptions. Smart, the former Alabama defensive coordinator who has elevated the Georgia (14-1) program since arriving in 2016, didn’t blink. He was sticking with Bennett.
“Man,” Smart said, “what a story.”
It took a while for the Georgia offense to get going against Alabama. The top-ranked defense kept the Bulldogs in the game, although Alabama losing dynamic deep-threat Jameson Williams to a knee injury in the second quarter certainly was a contributing factor. Just 37 days ago, Young torched Georgia for 421 yards through the air and three touchdowns. Without Williams, and fellow star receiver John Metchie (torn ACL) to contend with, the Bulldogs’ defense flexed its muscles.
“They won this game for us,” Bennett said of the Georgia defense.
Alabama seemed ready to take control after halftime, eating up 7:45 of the third-quarter clock with a 17-play, 68-yard drive that finally saw its running game get going. Brian Robinson Jr. ran for 35 yards on the drive, personally converting three third downs, but Agiye Hall let a third-down throw from Young go through his hands and Will Reichard’s 48-yard field goal was blocked.
On the very next play, James Cook ripped off a 67-yard run — the longest run Alabama allowed all year — setting Georgia up to go ahead on the game’s first touchdown. White took it in from a yard out, giving the Bulldogs their first lead, at 13-9, with 1:20 left in the quarter. Alabama responded with a long drive that ended with a field goal to get within a point. It marked the third time in as many trips into the red zone that the Tide couldn’t punch it in.
They finally broke through, thanks to a gift from Bennett. His fumble set up Alabama at the Georgia 16-yard-line. Bennett was trying to throw the ball away, but as he was being dragged down it slipped out of his hands and it was nonchalantly recovered by Brian Branch just before stepping out of bounds. On thirdand-goal, Young found tight end Cameron Latu while under a heavy rush from 3 yards out to give Alabama an 18-13 lead with 10:14 to go.
Bennett didn’t let his mistake keep him down. He came out throwing darts on the next possession and answered with his best throw of the night, a 40-yard strike to Adonai Mitchell as Georgia reclaimed the lead, with 8:09 on the clock. The Bulldogs wouldn’t trail again, and Bennett added to the lead with a 15-yard scoring strike to freshman tight end Brock Bowers.
“If any team deserves it, they deserve it,” Saban said. “They played great all year. We were the only team to beat them in the SEC Championship game. And we just couldn’t finish the game tonight like we wanted to.”