Good luck trying to catch up with Georgia
LOS ANGELES – If it was just about recruiting stars, it wouldn’t have been this dominating. If it was just about measurables, the most important players in the game wouldn’t have been a 5-foot-11 former walk-on quarterback and a receiver who was going to play at Chattanooga before getting the scholarship offer of his dreams.
Georgia isn’t sitting here as a back-toback national champion just because Kirby Smart never met a signing day he couldn’t win. Do stars matter? Sure. Just ask TCU, which likely realized within minutes Jan. 9 that its size, speed and skill quotient were not the same as the team on the other side of the field.
In miniature, Georgia’s 65-7 win was such a physical mismatch that there wasn’t a single part of the game where it looked like the Horned Frogs belonged in the same weight class.
But what Georgia has done to repeat as champions for the first time in the College Football Playoff era is about far, far more than recruiting. Georgia isn’t just beating everyone else in that department, it’s evaluating better, developing better and coaching better than any program in college football.
That doesn’t mean the Bulldogs are guaranteed to win championships as far as the eye can see. But would you bet against it, either? The fundamental reality of Georgia going 29-1 over the last two seasons is this: The rest of the sport has a lot of catching up to do.
If this run was just about the blue chips, it wouldn’t have happened behind Stetson Bennett becoming a surgeon of a quarterback who makes quick decisions and delivers the ball with accuracy to the wide range of weapons he has at his disposal. That’s player development.
If it was just about taking a list of the best skill players in a state loaded with them, Georgia wouldn’t have offered a scholarship to Ladd McConkey, who comes from a tiny town near the Tennessee border and didn’t draw any interest from other schools in the SEC. That’s player evaluation.
And if it was just about rolling the ball out on the field, Georgia wouldn’t be so creative and beautiful to watch on offense,
making quality teams look so ordinary week after week. That’s coaching.
When you put it all together, you get Bennett, McConkey and the rest doing pretty much whatever they want against TCU. But in the wider lens, Georgia has all three elements of its program operating at the absolute highest level, each one working hand-in-hand.
It won’t last forever because, in football, nothing ever does. But when you see what’s always seemingly in the pipeline for Georgia – my goodness, did you see those freshman defensive linemen making plays against TCU? – the vibes are unmistakably similar to Alabama’s dynasty at its peak. The difference is it might be even more terrifying for the opposition. At least with Alabama back in the day, they would play a surprisingly close game every now and then and maybe miss a field goal or two.
But Georgia? The Dawgs are all business,
and not a lot of programs are ever going to have what it takes to beat these guys when they’re humming like this.
“The word we use around our place is ‘connected,’ ” Smart said. “We stay connected, we’re hard to beat.”
In fact, we saw exactly what it takes on New Year’s Eve. It took the best game Ryan Day ever coached and C.J. Stroud ever played at Ohio State for the Buckeyes to come within a missed 50-yard kick of pulling off a semifinal upset. And the reality is, outside of Alabama, Ohio State is probably the only program in America that recruits enough raw material to even make it a game.
For all the $9 million salaries being thrown around in college football, that’s what everyone is up against. You can have your transfer portal, you can throw around as much name, image and likeness money as you want, but Georgia is still going to get its guys. And Smart has a
program set up right now to develop them, send them off to the NFL and bring in the next group.
Remember, Georgia was supposed to take a step back defensively after losing five first-round draft picks. And statistically, it wasn’t quite as good. But in the games that really mattered, it would have been difficult to tell the difference. That doesn’t happen just because something went right on signing day. That happens because Georgia’s doing it better than the competition every day.
The gap between Georgia and No. 2 is sizable, and Smart isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. The romp over TCU wasn’t just a football game, it was a statement to the rest of college football: If you want to get on Georgia’s level, you have to catch it on signing day, in evaluation and in player development. That’s the new standard. Best of luck to everyone trying to match it.