The Georgia Bulldogs trailed by 20 points and their quarterback was playing like a guy making his first career start and they were squabbling with one another and being outcoached all ends up, and at that moment you weren’t thinking, “A famous comeback will be forthcoming.” You were thinking that a good-as-gold Georgia Tech was expunging a decade’s worth of frustration on their rival’s noggin.
And really, why shouldn’t Georgia have been shattered by this Tech onslaught? Why shouldn’t the Bulldogs, who have seen almost nothing go right since September, collapse under the weight of a shining season gone sour?
Because, duh, they’re Bulldogs.
Two weeks after losing as crushing a game as any team can lose, Georgia took out some frustration of its own. The Bulldogs outscored Tech 41-14 over the final 30 1/2 minutes of regulation and two jangling overtimes. They won on a day when they probably should have lost, and in winning they proved they learned something from their Auburn experience: On this game’s final play, they knocked the ball down.
If you’re a crestfallen Yellow Jackets backer, you had to be thinking, “We’re up 20 at home against their No. 2 quarterback, and we still can’t win. If not now, when if ever?”
As the coaches met for their ritual handshake, Georgia’s Mark Richt appeared almost apologetic. His team had been outplayed so badly for so long as to give lie to the conventional wisdom that the Bulldogs are the massively more gifted side. For 54 minutes, Tech did everything anyone could have asked: It jumped ahead by exploiting the Bulldogs’ overmatched secondary — Tech can pass! — and nursed its lead until the end was within sight. Then Vad Lee, who had thrown to splendiferous effect, threw in the face of Georgia’s biggest blitz of the long afternoon, and there the game changed.
Safety Josh Harvey-Clemons intercepted the weak pass. Georgia kicked the tying field goal. Tech got the ball with a chance to win at the end of regulation, but linebacker Amarlo Herrera made thudding stops on first and second down after the Jackets pushed beyond midfield, and Lee missed DeAndre Smelter on third-and-7. And Paul Johnson, the coach who hates to punt, had his team punt from the Georgia 40 inside the final 45 seconds.
In the slog from 20 points behind to overtime, we saw Hutson Mason grow up. The Aaron Murray understudy who waited long for his starring turn completed only four of his first eight passes while being sacked twice and intercepted once, and the knee-jerk response was to say, “This is the guy some Georgia fans wanted to play ahead of the SEC’s all-time passing leader?”
But from there, Mason was terrific. He would throw for 299 yards and two touchdowns, and once the game went to overtime the onrushing Bulldogs had no further need of the forward pass. They snapped the ball four times. Mason handed it to Todd Gurley four times. Gurley gained 50 yards — in overtime alone, mind you — and scored the tying and winning touchdowns.
Finally it fell to the Bulldogs’ defense, awful in the early going and lousy on third-and-long all game. Early returns weren’t promising. The Jackets moved from the Georgia 25 to the 3 in four snaps, but Leonard Floyd dumped Robert Godhigh for a loss on third-and-2. On fourth-and-5, Lee threw over the middle for Darren Waller. Linebacker Ramik Wilson deflected the pass but, even as you were imagining Auburn’s Ricardo Louis charging onto this field and snagging this batted ball as well, cornerback Damian Swann swatted it away.
The Bulldogs’ joy was palpable — this matched the biggest blown lead in any Tech loss, equaling the 20-point advantage wasted against Georgia in 1978 — but the Jackets’ gloom was greater. Back to the coaches’ handshake: In no mood for consoling words, Johnson broke away and headed to his locker room, a loser to Georgia for the fifth time in five Novembers.
“It was a hard game to lose,” Johnson said. “It was a gut-wrenching game … Really not a whole lot to say about it.”
Contrast that somber sentiment with the words of Mason, who in his first start presided over a rally to rival any authored by Murray: “All those times when I thought about transferring … this type of game is what I dreamed of. I’m so thankful for this opportunity, and I’m just glad to be a Bulldog.”
Sometimes a team’s nickname is just a nickname. On the final day of a careening regular season, the Georgia team lived up to its sobriquet. With every reason to quit, these Bulldogs hunkered down one more time.
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