Brock Bowers, Jamon Dumas-Johnson share on how missing senior season impacted football careers
Georgia tight end Brock Bowers and inside linebacker Jamon Dumas-Johnson both enter their sophomore seasons expected to play big roles for the Bulldogs in 2022. That’s one thing they share in common. Another though, and maybe the one that has shaped their respective careers the most up to this point, would be missing out on a full year of football in 2020 when their senior seasons were cancelled due to COVID-19.
“It’s a tale of two players there. One played—I don’t know if he started—but he played a bunch against Clemson. Brock certainly made some plays and did some things right away in the Clemson game and had no acclimation problems there. He came in the spring,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said recently speaking about the process of both players getting adjusted back to playing football. “Pop (Dumas-Johnson) was a different scenario. He didn’t play his senior year, but he also didn’t come in that spring. He was a little bit heavier, a little out of shape, so it impacted Pop much differently than it impacted Brock. I think that had to do with not having spring practice and not being able to sustain quite as much.”
“Any time you can play your senior year, you’re going to be better off because you will have played football,” Smart continued. “Unfortunately, Brock didn’t get that opportunity to, but he did get an opportunity to get 15 practices and probably 100 walkthroughs with our team in the spring which helped him play early. Pop would’ve probably struggled to play for us last year because he hadn’t played football senior year and because he didn’t come in the spring. Obviously, we had some guys in front of him too.”
From the players’ perspectives though, it’s easy to see that neither enjoyed the experience. It was a frustrating year without football and challenging to find ways to stay in shape knowing that they’d be reporting to college in less than 12 months.
“I mean, during COVID, we didn’t have a football season my senior season. All there really was to do was just work out,” Bowers said. “And just, every single day I’d go lift and run and just kind of do whatever I really could. I was kind of like, hungry to get going again when we got back.”
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“Who wants to take a year off from football? I think that set me back just a little bit because of corona and those issues, you couldn’t really work out in Maryland,” Dumas Johnson added. “Once I got here, I was a little heavy but I tried to work out and keep my weight low. Once I got that going, It was like I never left before. Corona set me back but I got it going once I got used to it again.”
All of that is in the past now, and the present for both Bowers and Dumas-Johnson is bright headed into their sophomore seasons. Bowers looks to build on what was a record-breaking freshman campaign. Meanwhile, Dumas-Johnson has emerged as a leader on a defense that is desperately in need of them with eight players off to the NFL since they last suited up for a game.
A consensus top-three team in the country, Georgia kicks off its 2022 campaign against Oregon next Saturday – September 3rd – against No. 11/12 Oregon as one of two Chick-fil-A Kickoff Games hosted at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
