Georgia and TCU both chasing history, though in vastly different ways

LOS ANGELES – No. 1 Georgia and No. 3 TCU have more at stake Monday night than a national championship. When the Bulldogs and Horned Frogs play in the College Football Playoff Championship Game at Sofi Stadium, they will be chasing history on separate but no less powerful tracks.

The Bulldogs’ intent to become the first repeat national champion since Alabama a decade ago will collide with what even Horned Frogs coach Sonny Dykes called a “magical ride.” TCU has climbed from three blocks south of nowhere to reach the precipice of its first national championship since 1938. Georgia is nearly a two-touchdown favorite, a reflection of the talent grades of each roster. They also overheat the 24-hour engine of Georgia coach Kirby Smart.

“We’ve had a saying around our place for a long time that probability is not reality,” Smart said Sunday. “So we don’t control what people say. Reality is what happens on the field in between those lines. That’s what takes a lot more courage than just putting out probability.”

Smart served as defensive coordinator on those Crimson Tide teams of 2011 and ’12, Nick Saban’s second and third national championships at Alabama (collect all six). He left Saban’s staff after the 2015 season (the fourth title) and, in eight seasons, has coached Georgia to three CFP Championship Games. This is the first one in which the Dawgs won’t face the Tide. Trust me, no one is confusing TCU with Alabama.

Dykes’ acknowledgment of TCU’s improbability flouts the conventional wisdom of coaching, in which Cinderella status is treated as disrespect, if not outright bulletin-board fodder.

But Dykes, the son of the late longtime Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes, grew up in college football. He relishes the history and lore of a game that uses both to sink its tentacles into a willing fan base. Dykes, with his career record of 84-64, is aware that he has an opportunity never earned by the likes of such icons as Bo Schembechler, Barry Alvarez and R.C. Slocum. All three are College Football Hall of Fame members who never coached a game with the national championship at stake.

The key to TCU’s success has been Dykes’ ability to set aside his knowledge of and reverence for that history.

“I’m really proud of the way they’ve handled everything,” Dykes said of his players. “I think that they have exceeded expectations in terms of their ability to focus on what’s important and not get distracted.”

The players took their cue from the coach. Before his arrival at TCU a year ago, Dykes said last week, “The more I won, the worse I felt.” At each of his three previous head-coaching stops – Louisiana Tech, California, SMU – Dykes had teams that began fast and, as Dykes fretted about maintaining the team’s newly found stature, faded late.

+ Louisiana Tech in 2012: 9-1 start, 9-3 finish
+ Cal in 2015: 7-0 start, 8-5 finish
+ SMU in 2020: 7-1 start, 7-3 finish
+ SMU in 2021: 7-0 start, 8-4 finish

When Dykes moved from SMU to archrival TCU a year ago, he promised himself he wouldn’t look ahead.

“We have just kind of kept blinders on. You know what I mean?” Dykes said. “I do think that it’s been really freeing for me, personally, and I think for our players, that we kind of keep showing up and talking about trying to get better on a day-to-day basis. And I think it keeps us from being overwhelmed. It really does. When you love the game like I do and appreciate the game like I do, and you were brought up in the game like I was, you can get overwhelmed pretty quickly.”

Dykes is not listening to that voice in his brain, the one that knows that TCU is one victory short of becoming the most unexpected national champion since Clemson in 1981. Those Tigers went 6-5 the year before. These Frogs went 5-7 in 2021, and as Dykes has said repeatedly in the postseason, only four players on the roster had played in a bowl game before last week’s Fiesta Bowl victory over Michigan.

In a season that began with administrators and coaches publicly fretting that the effect of the transfer portal and NIL would tilt the power in the game even more toward the already powerful, TCU has illustrated that the rest of the sport can use those tools, too. Dykes brought in 14 transfers, and his starting lineup includes players he got from SMU (All-Big 12 center Alan Ali), Navy (Big 12 Defensive Newcomer of the Year linebacker Johnny Hodges) and ULM (All-Big 12 corner Josh Newton).

As tempting as it may be to cast Georgia as Goliath and TCU as David, reality is never so black and white. The career of Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett is, as Chris Fowler of ESPN said on “The Press Box” podcast, a Hollywood script waiting to be written. If Bennett, the walk-on, juco-and-back Heisman finalist, wills the Dawgs to victory as he did in the comeback victory over Ohio State in the Peach Bowl semifinal, he will be every bit the rags-to-riches story to which TCU aspires.

And if the Frogs show the physicality and willfulness that they displayed in eight come-from-behind victories, traits considered a part of Georgia’s DNA, they will have an opportunity to win one more game the experts say cannot be won. A TCU victory would deliver an intoxicating message to history, one too alluring for even Dykes to forestall.