WHAT THEY SAID

“It was a hell of a college football game. Being on this side of it is difficult to describe, the disappointment, the hurt that we feel, that those guys in that locker room feel right now. Some of them came in telling me, ‘Sorry.’

I said, ‘Don’t tell us you’re sorry.’ Our team laid it on the line. Every snap.”

— OKLAHOMA COACH LINCOLN RILEY

It was a Rose Bowl that was literally painted red, the color of both teams, a stadium solid with it. It was a four-hour duel featuring booming “O-U” chants from one side of the stadium, drawling “U-G-A” chants from the other side, and twinkling stars everywhere when Georgia fans continued their tradition of beginning the fourth quarter by turning on their smartphone flashlights.

The granddaddy of them all is still the greatest of them all.

— BILL PLASCHKE , LOS ANGELES TIMES

The final score was 54-48 Georgia inside the Rose Bowl on Monday and it’s hard to pin the loss on any single moment, and yet it’s even harder to entertain a single scenario by which the Sooners don’t beat the Bulldogs had Austin Seibert been told to do anything other than the thing he did with seconds remaining in the first half . ...

And that was when Seibert walked out to execute a squib kick, one of those grounders that’s supposed to get through the other side’s first line of players, except that it didn’t.

Tae Crowder snared it like he was playing the hot corner, the Bulldogs used four seconds to throw a 9-yard pass to Terry Godwin, leaving one second for Rodrigo Blankenship to kick a 55yard field goal, which he did.

It was the beginning of an epic defeat from the jaws of victory that still hardly feels real.

— CLAY HORNING, NORMAN TRANSCRIPT Across the hall in the middle of a small equipment room sat a man who invested more in the players and coaches from this Oklahoma season than anyone. He recruited all of them, hired all of them, and just because he turned the program over to his successor before the season started didn’t mean he stopped caring about them.

Bob Stoops spent the Rose Bowl near one end of the OU sideline. He bent at the waist, hands on his knees, like he used to do when he coached. He’d straighten long enough to rock back and forth on his feet, steal glances at the scoreboard clock, then get right back into position.

Now it was over and Stoops leaned forward again, sitting on that folding chair by himself and staring down at the phone he

held. — GUERIN EMIG, TULSA WORLD

Kirby Smart said during his halftime radio interview that the Bulldogs needed to “relax and get after the quarterback.” That’s exactly what happened in the second half. Outside of a couple of nice (Rodney) Anderson runs, the run game slowly was taken away. As Georgia mounted its comeback, the Bulldogs forced (Baker) Mayfield into some errant throws. The next thing anyone knew, Oklahoma was finding it tough to pick up third-down conversions.

— JASON BUTT, MACON TELEGRAPH

“This was a little bit personal for us.”

— ALABAMA COACH NICK SABAN AFTER BEATING CLEMSON 24-6 IN THE SUGAR BOWL, SETTING UP MONDAY’S CHAMPIONSHIP GAME

HARRY HOW / GETTY IMAGES Former Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops