Georgia Won a Big Game. Now Comes the Hard Part.
On College Football
The No. 3 Bulldogs beat No. 7 Notre Dame, 23-17, setting Georgia up for another run at a national title. Or not.
ATHENS, Ga. — It is a two-word mantra that recognizes Georgia football’s recent success and nods at the program’s history of unfulfilled hype.
“Do more.” That has been the rallying cry for this football team this season, and the scoreboard on Saturday night suggested the admonition was working.
No. 3 Georgia’s victory over Notre Dame, then No. 7, clearly moved it closer to football supremacy and left the big-talking fans of the Bulldogs aglow. But Georgia, the surest bet to win the languid Southeastern Conference East, must still outrun its own long history of showing promise but then peaking before it can get its hands on a national championship trophy.
“We understand how close we’ve been to taking the next step,” Kirby Smart, Georgia’s coach, said over the summer. “We’re not complacent in what we’ve done, and we know we need to take that next step. And for us, pressure is a reflection of ambition.”
When you fixed your eyes between Sanford Stadium’s hedges on Saturday, it was not hard, eventually, to see a team that could challenge the long-established Athens paradigm of close-but-not-quite seasons, including three since 2012 that sputtered with wrenching late losses to Alabama on some of the sport’s biggest stages.
Jake Fromm’s statistics on Saturday — 20 for 26 for 187 passing yards and no interceptions — were those of a controlled junior quarterback who could throw well and rely on a robust rushing attack. D’Andre Swift became the latest Georgia tailback to streak into a highlight reel by hurdling over a defender. On fourth down, the defense is more of a fortress. Rodrigo Blankenship is the rare kicker who can draw a sustained ovation.
Smart, himself a 43-year-old former Georgia defensive back who will still celebrate an interception with the bounce of a teenager, presided over a team that remained among the nation’s most efficient on both sides of the ball.
Georgia’s Saturday started ugly, though. A shank. A muffed punt that put Notre Dame within 10 yards of the goal line and a pass interference penalty to help the Fighting Irish along. A Notre Dame touchdown pass that wasn’t because Georgia called a timeout. Then an actual touchdown.
Georgia fumbled on its way to its first successful scoring drive. Its second offered plenty for film room contemplation, too. It all could have proved crippling. But midway through the third quarter, with the red pompoms pulsating and a chorus of bellows rising out of the record crowd at Sanford, the Irish started to look like a bedraggled road team and Georgia started to settle in like a national power playing at home.
In the first half, Georgia gained 114 yards and gave up 163. In the second, it logged 225 yards of offense and held Notre Dame to 158, 89 of them in the last seven minutes. Georgia stifled a final drive from Notre Dame — a Georgia radio broadcaster swiftly proclaimed that Smart’s defense had administered last rites — and won, 23-17.
“I definitely think that there was a sigh of relief there at the end,” said Blankenship, a senior accustomed to glorious Georgia moments and crushing letdowns.
It has long been defensible to tag Notre Dame as a program that so often draws its contemporary luster from history and hype, not trophies and results. A chart of the Irish’s record under Brian Kelly mimics a printout of an electrocardiogram.
And that can make it tempting to dismiss Georgia’s victory, aided by a crowd that tripped the visitors into false starts and timeouts, as another overrated Notre Dame team once again succumbing to the forces that actually matter on a football field.
It was not that.
In fact, Notre Dame, which fell to No. 10 after the loss, may still be able to make a case by season’s end that it belongs in the College Football Playoff, especially if it can go undefeated through the rest of a schedule that includes No. 18 Virginia, No. 20 Michigan and No. 21 Southern California.
And to diminish this season’s Notre Dame team would overlook both Georgia’s grit on Saturday and how it has gone from a program that started the 2010s with a 6-7 season to one that is poised to end the decade by contending.
Into Smart’s fourth year in Athens after his long apprenticeship under Nick Saban at Alabama, Georgia has acquitted itself well against top-10 teams not coached by Saban: It has beaten them six of seven times. After Smart’s inaugural season, which ended with an 8-5 record, Georgia has gone 28-5 with a conference title and a 3-point loss in the only national championship game of the playoff era that went to overtime.
Smart knows he has the architecture of a durable and deep program; now he has swung toward the finer details — “the aggregate of marginal gains” — so obsessed over by Saban.
Making good on that search could settle whether this season lets Georgia reach the championship milestone that beguiled and disappointed the successors to Vince Dooley, for whom Sanford Stadium’s field is newly named.
A former Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter, was president the last time his home state’s flagship university won a national championship. Almost 40 years later, Carter has the longest post-presidency in American history and the Bulldogs have watched some of their bitterest rivals, including Auburn and Tennessee, take home titles.
Georgia, of course, has still been very good since its sun-kissed 1980 season. It is one of just 16 programs to have appeared in the top five at least 75 times since. There have been five conference championships, 21 bowl victories and a Heisman Trophy winner. In that time, Georgia had just four losing seasons — better than Alabama, Auburn, Nebraska, Penn State and Texas.
This year could offer its best shot to shed what many in Athens see as something resembling a curse, in part because of the weakness of the SEC East. The Bulldogs will next play at Tennessee, and a team from Georgia — Georgia State — has already beaten the Volunteers in Knoxville this year.
To be sure, Georgia’s route to this year’s conference championship game in Atlanta still holds hazards, including games against No. 7 Auburn, No. 9 Florida and No. 23 Texas A&M. And if Georgia gets to make the drive on Highway 316 toward Atlanta, it is likely to meet Saban’s second-ranked Alabama juggernaut or a Louisiana State team that stands at No. 4 and has a quarterback in the hunt for the Heisman Trophy.
But by beating Notre Dame, Georgia played its way toward a postseason insurance policy, especially if it stumbles in the regular season.
“Eventually some team with two losses is probably going to get in because they have a better strength of schedule than a team that has one loss,” Smart said last week. “I think it’s better to go out and play the best games, and if you’re good enough, then you should be in there.’’
Georgia may well get its chance. The question is whether a new reckoning will lead to a different outcome, whether Georgia will be able to give new credence to its claim, played over the public-address system before the start of every game here, that there is “no tradition more worthy of envy.”
“We know the talent that we have now, and it’s just about going out there and handling business and showing the rest of the world what we can do,” Rennie Curran, a Georgia linebacker of an earlier renaissance that fell short, said on the sideline Saturday.
Past teams, Curran said, had not proven “able to necessarily handle success.”
“This team stays on it.”
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