Dominant CFP semifinal win gives Georgia a 2nd chance at Alabama

Georgia running backs Zamir White and James Cook tried to be discreet.

As the final 40 seconds ran off the clock Friday might during Georgia’s 34-11 College Football Playoff semifinal rout of Michigan in the Orange Bowl, they slithered through teammates on the Bulldogs’ sideline with a Gatorade cooler and worked toward their target — coach Kirby Smart.

A celebratory Gatorade bath appeared imminent. It never happened, though.

Smart nixed it before the players arrived. Adamantly.

The reason? The mission isn’t done yet and the Bulldogs still have one giant test separating them from a national championship — No. 1 Alabama, which beat Georgia 41-24 three weeks ago in the SEC Championship Game and rolled past Cincinnati 27-6 in the other CFP semifinal earlier in the day.

“I was wanting to get a real shower and not a Gatorade bath because I want to get focused on Alabama,” Smart said matter-of-factly after the game. “They’ve got a five-, six-hour head start, so I’ll be honest with you guys: I’m not interested in celebrating that.

“We’ll look back on that win and that’ll be great. But we’re focused on the task ahead, and that’s the objective. That’s what our guys — they worked their tails off for three to four weeks to get this opportunity. It was a one-game season. Now it’s another one-game season. I’m not focused on Gatorade baths.”

The players may get another opportunity to give Smart one on January 10. Especially based on how they played Friday night.

The easy 23-point win over the Big Ten champs sent a message that these Bulldogs aren’t to be underestimated, even against Alabama and even coming off that 17-point loss to the Tide earlier this month.

Georgia not only got back to playing at a dominant level on defense, holding the Wolverines to three points through 55 minutes, but the Bulldogs also have to feel good about the performance they got from the perceived weak link — quarterback Stetson Bennett.

Before the SEC title game, Bennett never had thrown for more than 269 yards in a game. Now, he’s done it in back-to-back contests, including 310 yards and three touchdown passes against Michigan.

Behind Bennett, Georgia accumulated 518 yards of total offense against a Wolverines defense that was ranked 11th nationally in total defense (316.2 yards per game) — 202 fewer than the Bulldogs compiled Friday.

“I thought he performed at a really high level,” Smart said of Bennett. “He’s been really focused the last couple weeks. I think it’s amazing to have a guy his age block out all the noise and just focus harder. It’s almost like every time he hears noise, he just focuses harder on the game plan and what he has to do to execute.

“And you look at some of the plays he made out there with his feet. They couldn’t account for his mobility and some of the plays he made with his feet. And just really proud of the way he prepped for this game.”

Now comes an even bigger challenge.

It’s a chance for Georgia to avenge its loss from a month ago. And a chance for Smart and the Bulldogs to avenge their other three losses to the Tide in the past four seasons, including the overtime loss in the CFP title game during the 2017 season.

“I didn’t have any questions about this team,” Smart said. “The resiliency, the bounce-back, the amount of character — I’ve seen it all year. We didn’t play well (against Alabama) and we turned the ball over and didn’t get any turnovers and played poor in the red area. You can list all the things we did in the last game, and that’s all our kids have heard about for three weeks. But our focus has been on, OK, what can we get better at? Where can we turn our energy? Because it does no good to look backwards. … We always say, ‘You can’t let a loss beat you twice.’ And we didn’t let that happen today. And now we get to focus our energy on a really good football team, and that’s where we’ll turn our heads and attention now.”