ATHENS – Tim Tebow was no Jalen Milroe. Lamar Jackson might be comparable, though he’s certainly not as big or strong.
That was Kirby Smart’s assessment of the Alabama quarterback the No. 1-ranked Georgia Bulldogs will face in the SEC Championship Game on Saturday in Mercedes-Benz.
So, to review, Milroe is at least as good as a couple of past Heisman Trophy Award winners. And as everyone has seen throughout the year, Georgia is not particularly adroit at defending mobile quarterbacks.
Might as well go ahead and etch “Alabama Crimson Tide” on the SEC Championship trophy. While they’re at it, inscribing “Jalen Milroe” on the MVP award ought to save everybody some time Saturday.
“No offense to Tim Tebow, but this guy is different,” Smart said Monday when asked if the Milroe was comparable to the 2009 Heisman Trophy winner from Florida. “Tim (had) a different running style, very different running style in terms of what they did and how they did things. This guy is, I mean, it’s like when I used to ask my sons who they were playing with on the Madden game, and they would say, ‘I’m playing with the Ravens.’ I would say, ‘why are you playing with the Ravens?’ And they’d say, I got Lamar Jackson and nobody can tackle him.
“Well, this guy’s a bigger, physical version of that. He’s playing in a different speed than everybody else when you watch it. And that’s the way the Madden game was for him.”
Milroe’s size actually is a matter of some debate. Alabama’s roster has him listed at 6-foot-2, 220-pounds. Milroe himself scoffed at those measurements, though he playfully declined to say what they really are.
“Nah, that ain’t accurate,” Milroe said with a laugh. “I’m much bigger than that. I was that, like, freshman year.”
Milroe certainly is not a freshman anymore. He’s a third-year sophomore. So, he’s bigger and he’s also better. He’s not even the same quarterback he was early in the season.
At that this late juncture, it’s easy to forget that Milroe actually was benched earlier this season, or whatever that was that occurred in Week 3. The week after the Crimson Tide lost to Texas 34-24 in Tuscaloosa, Milroe did not play the following Saturday when Alabama visited the University of South Florida.
But he played the following week against Ole Miss and every Saturday since. Notably, the Tide (11-1) hasn’t lost again, and Milroe has continued to get better as the season has progressed.
“I never doubted J-Mill,” said Alabama linebacker Deonte Lawson, also a redshirt sophomore. “I met with him alone after the Texas loss and just told him I believed in him and had faith in him. He’s a great teammate, his leadership is unmatched and his personality is great.”
So is his quarterbacking ability. The last time the world saw Milroe in action, he was delivering a 31-yard, game-winning touchdown pass to Isaiah Bond with 32 seconds remaining to lift No. 8 Alabama to a 27-24 win over Auburn. Milroe was just about all the Tide had in that game, passing for 259 yards and 2 touchdowns and rushing for 107 yards on 18 carries.
Milroe’s actions as he left the field at Jordan-Hare drew almost as much attention as the game-winning play itself. The quarterback went viral on social media for an expletive-laced tirade about the Heisman Trophy. Much of it can’t be repeated in a family publication but to paraphrase, he shouted to Heisman voters that they should move him up to one on their ballots.
Asked about it on Monday, Milroe seemed to regret the outburst.
“First off, that was an emotional moment, so things came out that were all through emotion. So that’s number one,” Milroe said on the SEC championship players teleconference call. “But the biggest thing was I was just so proud to be in the moment. The thing I want to do is be the best teammate I can be and worry about the task at hand. The task at hand is to try to improve from Auburn.”
Whether it was in response to Milroe’s urging or merely his play on the field, he did move past Georgia quarterback Carson Beck into fourth in the latest Heisman odds posted by Las Vegas sportsbooks Monday. But at plus-10,000, Milroe remains well behind Oregon’s Bo Nix, LSU’s Jayden Daniels and Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. for the college football’s most outstanding player award.
The reality is, Milroe’s numbers aren’t really comparable to those the other candidates have posted. He has completed 66.4% of his passes for 2,526 yards, 21 touchdowns and 6 interceptions. He’s also the Tide’s third-leading rusher with 439 yards and a team-high 12 scores.
That does, however, make Milroe the best dual-threat quarterback the Bulldogs have faced all season. And those other ones have proved difficult for Georgia to defend.
As recent as last Saturday against Georgia Tech’s Haynes King and going all the way back to Game 3 against Spencer Rattler and South Carolina, the Bulldogs have faced quarterbacks who either ran the football effectively via designed runs or simply utilized athleticism for escape-ability and to extend passing plays.
Rattler led the Gamecocks in both passing (256) and rushing (50) as Georgia had to come back for a 24-14 win in Sanford Stadium. Auburn’s Payton Thorne also gave Georgia fits on Sept. 30, getting loose for a 61-yard run and rushing for 92 yards on a day the Bulldogs also had to rally in the fourth quarter for victory. But he wasn’t nearly as adept a passer. Tech’s King accounted for 43 yards on the ground last week, not counting a pair of sacks, and ran for two touchdowns. But he managed only 158 yards passing.
What separates Milroe is his ability to both run and throw exceptionally well. And he advances the football both via designed runs as well as scrambling on pass plays for the Crimson Tide.
For that reason, many of the traditional responses to a run-threat quarterbacks -- such as establishing a “spy” in the center of the defensive formation -- simply aren’t very effective. For evidence, simply watch Bama’s winning offensive play on the Plains. Milroe surveyed the field for more than eight seconds before delivering the winning touchdown pass to Isaiah Bond in the back, left-corner of the end zone.
“It helped us that they were in that particular look,” Milroe said of not getting pressured. “It was all about taking advantage of whatever they game us.”
Therein is the rub. The good news for the Bulldogs is, at this point, they have extensive experience facing the concept. It certainly would be helpful to have All-America middle linebacker Jamon Dumas-Johnson in the lineup, but instead it looks like it will be true freshman CJ Allen for a fourth consecutive game.
“You know, I’d say he’s more of a different guy,” Georgia cornerback Kamari Lassiter said Monday of Milroe. “We haven’t really faced anybody of his caliber this season. So, it’ll definitely be a challenge because it’s very difficult to account for the quarterback running. That’s something we’ll definitely have to work on as a defense.”
To keep it in perspective, though, Milroe and Alabama haven’t encountered a defense quite like Georgia’s either. Flawed as it is and has been all season, the Bulldogs lead the SEC and are ranked sixth in the nation in scoring defense (15.9 ppg). Against all those teams with athletic, mobile quarterbacks – including Tennessee and Joe Milton – Georgia’s defense allowed just 17.6 points per game and won by an average margin of 16.2.
“When you look at tape, you’re never as bad as you think and never as good as you think,” Smart said Monday. “There are some mis-fits in there, some guys maybe not keying what they’re supposed to key. … I actually thought that we struck blocks and played the blocks really well up front, better than I thought coming out. It was not a matter of, ‘oh, we just got whipped.’ It was a matter of some things we didn’t fit well.”
Then, again, Georgia hasn’t faced a quarterback with the play-making skills than the one it will face Saturday. Based on Monday’s scouting report, the Bulldogs will be facing a better passer than Tebow and a more powerful runner than Jackson at the quarterback position.
“He is a tremendous, tremendous football player,” Smart said. “I mean, I didn’t really know until I got further into watching games last night how good he really is at what he does. And I think anytime you can scramble and extend plays, á la Stetson (Bennett), really anybody, it makes it harder to defend. When you have the component of designed runs mixed in with that, it complicates it even more.”
Fortunately for Georgia, it does have a decent offense of its own. The Bulldogs are one of only three teams in the country that is ranked in the national top 10 in both points allowed and points scored (39.6).
So, Georgia is capable and willing to enter into an “have to out-score” scenario. Sounds like that may be the only hope it has.
