Georgia Bulldogs soak in 'special' run to perfect season
LOS ANGELES — Georgia’s 65-7 win over TCU on Monday night in the 2023 National Championship Game was one for the record books. Not only was the win itself impressive with marks including the most points scored in a National Championship Game ever, the largest margin of victory in a bowl game ever and several individual accolades, but it also capped off the special season in a special way.
Georgia went 15-0 for the first time in program history, and the Bulldogs became one of just three teams in the modern era of College Football to win consecutive uncontested titles and the first in the Playoff era. In the process though, they did something that last year’s team couldn’t accomplish – a goal of theirs coming into the season.
“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.”
“I think, when you come back and look at it, because when you want to compare teams you’ll say, ‘Hey, look at this team,’ there’s some parts of me that think, if the team last year played this year’s team, last year’s team probably had more talent on it. But this year’s team was different,” Smart continued. “Like, they just had this eye of the tiger; they weren’t going to lose.”
Smart’s right: this year’s team found motivation in other areas than losses. Instead, they took their motivation from outside doubt that they could do it. Sure, folks didn’t necessarily think Georgia was going to fall off the face of the earth, but the Bulldogs weren’t necessarily the favorite to win it all despite returning the quarterback that led them there the season before.
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“At the beginning of the year we had a meeting, and we all said we wanted to do something different than last year,” Georgia tight end Brock Bowers said. “We did. One thing we were able to do was win the SEC Championship. We did that, and we just kept going. I’m just so proud of everybody.”
Georgia is just the fourth team ever to finish a season 15-0. Penn did so in 1897 followed by Clemson and LSU in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Alabama went 13-0 in the COVID-shortened 2020 season and teams like Ohio State, Alabama, Auburn and Florida State have reached 14-0 in the pre-Playoff era but Smart’s squad certainly joins a select list. The Bulldogs know it’s special and acknowledged it as such after the game.
“Yeah, I mean, it’s special,” Stetson Bennett said. “It seems like for the past three or four months we’ve been looking to see if somebody could beat us, and we just ran out of games. Nobody could.”
