ATLANTA — In a college football season where perfection was elusive, Georgia has become the sport’s rock — solid, hard, pretty much immovable from the No. 1 spot for most of the season.
You might have noticed, if you didn’t fall asleep halfway through the No. 1 Bulldogs’ 50-30 destruction of No. 14 LSU in the 2022 SEC Championship Game. Following a weekend of upsets, the Dawgs chomped down on the Tigers and never let go on the way to their first SEC title since 2017.
Georgia will enter the College Football Playoff the same way it ended last season: No. 1. Judging by Saturday’s performance, the two playoff games the Dawgs have to transverse to defend their national championship look like speed bumps.
As the season wound down, almost everyone wavered. Georgia? It got better.
If Saturday isn’t a peak, then God help the rest of the playoff field. The Dawgs opened the scoring blocking a field goal and returning it 96 yards for a score. They later scored two touchdowns in 20 seconds with an interception off a LSU player’s helmet in between. They knocked out Tigers quarterback Jayden Daniels at halftime. Turns out Daniels got out just in time. LSU signal callers were sacked eight times.
Conflicted about a Heisman Trophy favorite? You could do worse than Georgia’s Stetson Bennett IV, who might have reserved a flight to New York for himself by tossing four touchdowns — in the first half.
With 13 minutes left, Georgia’s 50 points were the fifth-most in the three-decade history of the SEC Championship Game. It mercifully stayed at half a hundred. The moveable feast of Georgia excellence that is 70 miles from campus in Mercedes-Benz Stadium now has all but booked another “home” game in the first round of the playoff in the Peach Bowl semifinal.
This time, the weekend, the favorite didn’t blink. At the completion of Georgia’s first SEC title in five years, three of the top five and four of the top nine in the CFP had lost their most recently played games. Meanwhile, the Dawgs extended the nation’s longest active winning streak to 15 games.
This season was defined by everybody else having issues, scars, problems, inconsistencies. Remember when there were no really good teams? Turns out even the No. 3 TCU Horned Frogs had warts in an overtime loss to No. 10 Kansas State. No. 4 USC was bullied Friday night by No. 11 Utah.
Georgia had a goal, not only to get back in the…
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