The Georgia Bulldogs escaped September 3-1. They’ll exit November 11-1, and Dec. 7 they’ll play for the SEC title. Not since 2005 has the SEC champion failed to play for the BCS title. Nothing we’ve seen so far — and we’ve seen a lot — suggests that these Bulldogs aren’t capable of winning any game anywhere. Nothing, I say.
LSU forced the Bulldogs to the wall Saturday, nosing ahead in a careening game with 4:14 remaining. From there, Georgia made everything look … dare we say “easy”? They reclaimed the lead by surging 75 yards in six plays, and only one of the six snaps came on second down. The winning touchdown came when Justin Scott-Wesley ran through a secondary that didn’t deign to cover him.
The Bulldogs, who lost only a slightly dissimilar game to Alabama in December, showed how much they’ve grown since that excruciating day. Without their best receiver (Malcolm Mitchell, lost since Clemson) and with the best runner in the land (Todd Gurley) lost in the first half to a sprained ankle, Georgia still stacked 498 yards on the Tigers, whose defense is overseen by the esteemed John Chavis. But the men of Chavis couldn’t begin to handle this raging offense, especially at what Georgia coach Mark Richt would call “the moment of truth.”
For the Bulldogs, this moment of truth rang true. “I did see a difference (from the Alabama game),” said receiver Chris Conley, whose catch of Aaron Murray’s deflected pass was the final act of that classic. “The first difference was that we finished. The second was that we were completely in our element. The offense knew exactly what we had to do. We have a lot of seniors, a lot of guys who know how to play in this sort of game.”
Said tight end Arthur Lynch: “The Alabama game gave us a level of confidence. We understand how to handle these games, and that gives us a kind of calmness.”
As good as LSU was this day, its final fling yielded one first down, 11 yards, one sack and four incompletions. The Tigers could not stop — could not even slow — Georgia when it mattered most. The Bulldogs, who surrendered 449 yards themselves, were nonetheless able to summon up the stop that carried the day.
You can say that Georgia was lucky to win, and technically you’d be right — the difference in a 44-41 game is minuscule — but factually you’d be wrong. Georgia was the better team with the better quarterback, the better offense, no worse a defense and, at least on this day, the better coaching. Credit the Tigers for hanging around as long as they did, but hanging around isn’t winning.
The Bulldogs under Richt know all about coming close: They finished No. 3 in the BCS standings in 2002 and No. 5 in 2007, and last season they fell 5 yards short of the BCS title game. They’ve been stuck in that narrow margin between good and great. This team has greatness within it. This team has already made a canard of the contention that Richt and Murray can’t win the big one, and there will be bigger ones ahead.
“Our resume looks pretty good at this moment … we have accomplished something,” Richt said. “But I think everybody knows we can get better.”
In August, Richt said he believed his team would be very good by season’s end was, but wasn’t sure it could hold up against this front-loaded schedule. The Bulldogs lost at Clemson, which in the grand scheme was the early game to lose, and have since faced down South Carolina and LSU. No team in these United States has posted two September victories of such magnitude.
Now Georgia has time to right its wrongs — “Every game’s going to be a barnburner until our defense gets stouter,” Richt said — as the schedule eases. The Bulldogs will be favored in every game until December, and Florida, which looms as the only real hurdle, has lost its starting quarterback. By proving so much so soon, Georgia can concern itself now with simply improving.
Which won’t be easy, at least not on offense. Murray was great again, earning this appraisal from his coach: “He played beautifully. He played clutch. It was phenomenal. It was gutsy.”
And the offensive line that was a source of such concern after Clemson? It blocked LSU so well that Georgia rushed for 196 yards with Gurley watching the second half, that Murray wasn’t sacked once.
Yes, there will come a time when Georgia will need to stop an opponent more than occasionally, but at some point somebody’s going to have to stop Georgia. It’s entirely possible that these Bulldogs will prove unstoppable — even by Alabama.
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