They saw Georgia, the American dynasty of the moment, take a meritorious group of Horned Frogs from TCU, wallop them by 65-7 inside SoFi Stadium, and turn them into something that looked an awful lot like prey. They saw Georgia claim the first repeat national championship of the College Football Playoff era (and the first overall in 10 years), become the fourth team ever to go 15-0, and reach 29-1 over two seasons between which the NFL spent late April raiding their roster for 15 players, including five defenders in the first round of the draft.
They saw collaborative greatness even if they did not see competitive drama.
“I hope [Georgia fans] understand the message I’m about to say,” said Kirby Smart, the seventh-year Georgia coach, former Georgia player and utmost Georgia man. “They can’t take it for granted. You can’t take opportunities like this for granted. And they showed up in full force. And they’d better never get tired of it because we need them.”
Two thousand miles from Athens, Ga., they saw things of which they might never tire. They saw a rugged bunch of Bulldogs sprinkle the field with both the elegant plays and inelegant stops necessary to elevate their college football to among the finest forms yet seen. Nine days after a 42-41 escape from Ohio State in a Peach Bowl national semifinal, they saw a lovely urgency that prompted TCU Coach Sonny Dykes to spot “a lot of pride in their performance in the way they played.”
They saw something — really something — that called to mind others that decorated their repeat titles with romps, such as Nebraska in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl (62-24) or Alabama in the 2013 Bowl Championship Series title game (42-14), and they saw a reinforcement of the towering reality that the best American football comes from the Southeast, the region of eight straight national championships from four different universities.
From the get-go Monday night, Georgia players ran in the open prairies of their own creation and reflective of their own array of threats, from 25-year-old quarterback Stetson Bennett IV streaming in through gaping space for a 21-yard touchdown run that opened the scoring, to Ladd McConkey catching a 37-yard touchdown pass from Bennett on which McConkey ran so unbothered he looked kind of lonely, to tight end Brock Bowers making precise catches of precise throws to amass seven catches for 152 yards and a masterful third-quarter touchdown.
If you needed Georgia to demonstrate it could whoosh down the field in a hurry, it could do that, with drives such as four plays for 70 yards, five for 57 or four for 55. If you needed it to show it could plod along effectively, it could do that, with 11 plays for 92 yards or 11 plays for 66 yards. If you wished for schemes that left people gapingly open, they had those, and if you wished for precision passes like Bennett’s 22-yard touchdown pass to a well-guarded Adonai Mitchell that made it 38-7 at halftime, they had those.
“[They] kind of just executed on our misalignments and kept scoring on those,” TCU linebacker Dee Winters said. “We kept beating ourselves up, just overthinking, trying to run to fast to the ball and things of that nature.”
In defense of that defense, people often undergo personality disruptions in the presence of greatness. Georgia hogged 589 yards with beautiful balance of 254 (ground) and 335 (air), and Bennett floated in the quarterback-rating clouds all game long before landing on a delirious 226.9, which Smart called “amazing” and “probably his best game of his career,” and Bennett passed 18 for 25 for 304 yards and four touchdowns, rushed for 39 and two more scores, and earned his second consecutive offensive MVP in national title games.
“And,” Smart said, “when you have a quarterback that can do the protections and check things and know what the defense is doing, yet still beat you with his feet, you have a high-level quarterback.”
That’s a high-level quarterback from Georgia who walked on at Georgia in 2017, transferred from Georgia to a Mississippi junior college in 2018, then transferred back to Georgia in 2019 even as his own coaches joined in making him overlooked. Then all these years later, he’s a two-title quarterback who spent his final college quarter on the sideline with calm nerve endings after Smart called timeout to give Bennett a curtain call of which Bennett said, “The huddle, I told all the guys, ‘What are we doing? Why don’t we have a play?’” Then he grasped the reason and felt emotional “in the huddle, just as simple as it is, just one last huddle with the guys, you know?”
Yet all the while, something just as artistic happened elsewhere in the game stats, even if it was the kind of art that causes bruises. A TCU team (13-2) that only once gained fewer than 377 yards in a game all its giddy season suddenly gained 188. A darling of an unlikely finalist that rushed for 263 yards in a dreamy Fiesta Bowl semifinal win over Michigan suddenly rushed for 36. Where 32 pretty first downs went to Georgia, nine gnarly ones went to TCU. TCU’s best player, wide receiver Quentin Johnston, caught one pass for three yards. A portentous early sack saw TCU star quarterback Max Duggan with a harsh committee of defenders around him: Jalen Carter, Nazir Stackhouse and Smael Mondon.
“I mean, they were good up front,” Duggan said. “They had some good blitzes, some good pressures that got through. I held onto the ball a little bit too long, wasn’t getting through reads, was kind of causing trouble for the offensive line myself. It was kind of on me. But . . .”
But: “They had some good schemes.”
“As a kid, you know, you always dream of moments like this,” said Georgia defensive back Javon Bullard, who intercepted two passes.
It all sent that former defender and defensive coach Smart on a near-soliloquy about his defensive scout team, and it all looked like TCU had come across something bigger and faster and mightier than it had seen. It’s something that reigns — and rains red-and-black — over the football country now, standing 81-15 in the seven-season tenure of Smart, the former Georgia defensive back who once coordinated the defense of another dynasty, Alabama. His latest Georgia team would find “a consistency of performance [that] is hard to find,” Smart said, and he would express admiration for that. And those watching Georgia, especially those in Georgia red and black, would know they had seen a level rare in all the years of the art.
“It seems like for the past three of four months,” Bennett said, “we’ve been looking to see if somebody could beat us, and we just ran out of games.”
And then he finished: “Nobody could.”