Mark Richt weighs if Georgia can three-peat as national champions

Georgia won its second straight national championship with a 65-7 win over TCU, but the conversation quickly shifted to a possible third straight title.

Former Georgia coach Mark Richt thinks it can be done. It would be quite the feat considering it hasn’t been accomplished since Minnesota won three straight from 1934-36, being the only school to win three in a row.

But, with the way Georgia recruits and Kirby Smart coaches, Richt said it could be done in the modern era.

“It’ll be tough but the one thing they have is great players and (they’re) bringing in more great players on top of it,” Richt said on Sirius XM’s ESPNU Radio. “So just to get playing time you better be ready to get after it every single day and take care of business and prove you deserve to start. Prove you deserve playing time. And the thing that Georgia has now is similar to what we had at Florida State. 

“We had kids that would stay and be a little patient. And not just bolt every time something wasn’t going well, because they knew when their day came, they had a chance to have big numbers and big success and still get where they wanted to go, which was the NFL. So I think the guys at Georgia understand that they have to compete for everything to get but they also know that in the end, they can certainly get where they want to go.”

Can Georgia do it again? Fans will have to wait eight months for the answer. It certainly won’t be easy, particularly with rising programs such as LSU and Tennessee within the SEC.

Alabama will be back as well, as long as Nick Saban is the head coach. Fans can’t forget about Ole Miss and South Carolina as well, giving the conference high remarks going into next fall.

Georgia will likely be the preseason No. 1 overall team for 2023 after winning its second straight national championship.

“Sometimes it takes a loss to galvanize, put your team in a spot to win. It did that last year. And it didn’t take that. I always tell guys, do you have to take a loss to learn? Why? Like, it doesn’t take that to learn that. This team is special because they didn’t have a flaw,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, who was a part of a 14-0 team at Alabama in 2009, said. “They had two games in which they came back in the fourth quarter, Missouri and Ohio State, with incredible comebacks and led by Stetson and the offense.”