Stetson Bennett shines in season-opener, says there's still room to grow

Stetson Bennett had his best career-game on Saturday in Georgia’s season-opening 49-3 win over No. 11 Oregon. The stats say so at least, and Bennett himself agrees.

“Yeah, probably. Yeah, probably the best one I’ve played, yeah,” Bennett said.

“I’d say probably the off-season, all the work, putting it in with these guys, year three in the offense,” he continued when asked why that was. “Again, having time and having the playmakers outside. So I think a combination of a lot of things.”

Bennett completed 25 of his 31 pass attempts for a career-high 368 yards and two touchdowns. Of those 25 completions, 10 of them went for 15 yards or more. In total, eight different Georgia receivers caught a ball from Bennett. What was he most proud of though? Georgia did not fail to convert a third-down while he was in the game, scoring touchdowns on all six of his drives.

“I mean, yeah, there’s something to him being the starting quarterback the whole time, right?,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said when how Bennett being the start all of the offseason impacted his performance today. “If we had rotated ones and twos and you guys had debated who the starter was, would he have played this well today? I don’t know.”

“I don’t think Stetson really gets affected by anything I do, you do or anybody does,” he continued. “Stetson lives in his own world, and he does a really good job of blocking out all the noise. The guy had a flip phone, okay, in 2021. He doesn’t really get into all that. I think that’s what his kind of edge is, and he made some plays that he didn’t make the right decisions on today, and he knows those. He knows his mistakes. He’s got to be smart. He does things that maybe we don’t ask him to do. But he did make some plays with his feet, and I think you take the good, and I’m not going to call it bad, but you take the good with his poor decisions.”

Still, like Smart said, there were plays that Bennett would like to have back. He even admitted to making a mistake on a touchdown to Ladd McConkey, scrambling around and avoiding defenders before finding a wide open McConkey in the end zone. What should he have done instead? Thrown it away and gotten to 2nd and Goal from the 1-yard-line.

“I mean, it wasn’t smart. I need to not do that, 1st and Goal from the 1,” Bennett said. “But I knew that we had motioned Ladd over there, and obviously we had never hit him, but I knew — I started scrambling and I was trying to find him because I knew he was over there somewhere, and then found him and threw it. It probably wasn’t smart. I needed to either ground it at him (McIntosh) or run it or throw it to Brock (Bowers) or something front side. Especially 1st down and 1, don’t do that. But it did work out.”

It did work out, just like almost everything that Bennett did on Saturday afternoon. Georgia put the ball in the air a combined 37 times between Bennett and backup quarterback Carson Beck who entered the game in the third quarter. That worked today, but to read anything more into it than that might be making too much of it.

“It worked today, but who’s to say that we don’t run it 40 times next week,” Bennett said. “That’s what the connection, the unselfishness for each and every position player on the team and O-line, like whatever is working, it’s about the team. It doesn’t matter if we throw it 30 whatever times we threw it today or we run it 40 times. Whatever is working, however we’re going to win that day is how we’re going to win.”

“You know, I think it’s more important to come out and play the next one. You know, we had a good one. But it’s over now. This game is over, and we’ve got next week’s opponent,” he continued. “I think our guys are really mature, and I think that we attack it like it is a business, like it is our job, because it is. When you do it that way and you go out and you know the little tiny things that you need to know to make a good offense a good offense, then you can be a good offense.”