Bulldogs revel in No. 1 ranking
ATLANTA — Georgia has always carried itself with the swagger of a powerhouse football program.
You know, the kind that contends for a national title just about every season, and wins one every now and then.
Like all those schools around them.
Well, this might be the team that finally brings reality in line with the lofty expectations between the hedges. In Kirby Smart’s second season as coach, Georgia has won its first eight games — all but one by at least three touchdowns, with the only exception being an impressive 20-19 victory at Notre Dame — and claimed the No. 1 spot in the first College Football Playoff rankings. How ‘Bout Them Dawgs! Before we get ahead of ourselves, Georgia still has four games left in the regular season — including, most ominously, a road trip to No. 16 Auburn — and a probable showdown with Nick Saban and the Alabama Crimson Tide (which sits atop the Associated Press poll) for the Southeastern Conference championship.
That matchup, in all likelihood, will serve as play-in game to the fourteam playoff.
But, hey, we’ll let the Bulldogs’ long-suffering fans savor the moment.
They’ve waited nearly a decade to see a “1’’ beside their team’s name — and much, much longer to have a real reason to celebrate.
“It’s human nature when you’ve been wanting something really bad for a long time and you’ve seen your neighbors doing it, you get that much more excited when you see that potential in front of you,” former Georgia linebacker Frank Ros said when reached at his suburban Atlanta home Friday. “Kirby is doing a great job making sure the players understand that, hey, this is just part of what we’ve got to do.”
Ros knows what it takes to get to the top.
He was the captain of Georgia’s only national championship team, way back in 1980.
This team, Ros said, is cut from a similar cloth.
“There are some common denominators,” he explained. “One, a very strong running game. Two, a swarming defense that’s playing very disciplined right now.” And three, several players passing on a chance to enter this year’s NFL draft left these Bulldogs with a strong senior class.
“On that ’80 team, one of our biggest assets was the strength of our senior leadership,” Ros recalled.
It’s still early, but Smart certainly has Georgia on the right track. He brought in one of the nation’s top recruiting classes this year, a group that included quarterback Jake Fromm, who took over the starting job in the very first game when Jacob Eason was injured (and left a now-healthy Eason on the sideline, playing the role of Wally Pipp). The Bulldogs are already on their way to another stellar group in 2018 with commitments from two of the country’s top prospects, quarterback Justin Fields and running back Zamir White.
After serving as Saban’s defensive coordinator, Smart is trying to build everything in the image of his former boss, right down to moving Georgia’s weekly media day to Monday from its traditional spot on Tuesday.
Now, all he needs is a championship.
In these parts, nothing else will do.