The beginning of the college football season always brings about Christmas Eve-style excitement for the biggest fans of the sport.
For Georgia Bulldogs fans, the season will bring with it an extra bit of intrigue, as the Dawgs seek to do what no other college football team has done since Minnesota in the 1930s — win three straight national championships.
There’s a reason why it’s so rare.
First, for years — predating the current College Football Playoff system — national champions in major college football were crowned almost more like the winners of a beauty pageant than anything else.
You almost had to go undefeated in order to have consideration. You had to win impressively and against good to elite competition, and you had to have at least one or two of the top players in the country on your squad.
Why? Because, back in the day, college football national champions were decided by poll voters. And your team had to play well enough to get enough of them on your side to vote that squad in.
That’s hard to do in a sport where talent turnover happens every two, three or four years due to graduation, transfers and athletes bolting early from college to try their hand in the pros.
In those days, even after a team would be voted national champion, the arguments against that vote would ensue for years to come. In some cases, some of those arguments are ongoing. Because there was more than one poll — in more recent times it was the Associated Press poll and the Coaches’ poll — that determined a national championship, some teams had to settle for being “co-champions” because the sports writer of the AP poll and the coaches voting in the coaches’ poll couldn’t come to a unanimous consensus.
For example: There are 14 teams that have won back-to-back national championships. Of those, seven schools were named co-champions. Alabama (1964, 1965), Michigan State (1965, 1966), Texas (1969, 1970, co-champs with two other teams in 1970), Nebraska (1970, 1971, co-champions with two other teams in 1970), Oklahoma (1974, 1975, co-champs in 1974) and Alabama (1978, 1979, co-champs in 1978).
That’s crazy to me. Especially in 1970 when you had three teams that never played each other in a playoff setting calling themselves national champions.
I think back to the days when my Nebraska Cornhuskers were considered the nation’s elite. Nebraska won back-to-back national championships in 1994 and 1995. Took a break in 1996 when hall-of-famer quarterback Tommie Frazier graduated, forcing Nebraska to have to break in a new quarterback named Scott Frost.
Frost helped get the Huskers back to those winning ways in 1997.
It could be argued that Nebraska should’ve had a three-peat because of the 1993 loss to Florida State in the Orange Bowl. That 18-16 defeat was marred by bad calls on both sides, but two of the most egregious took a touchdown off the board for Nebraska on a punt return and added a score for the Seminoles on a fourth down run where the ball clearly popped out of William Floyd’s hands as he tried to cross the goal line.
If that game happens in the era of instant replay, it probably would’ve resulted in a win for Nebraska and the first of three national titles.
But, again, this is why such feats are so difficult. Too much ambiguity in college football. Too many other people — from officials to poll voters — with their hands in the mix, able to manipulate the action in some way.
Yet, here we stand with Georgia being the latest team with a chance to make history. And, to be sure, the college football world is much different now than it has ever been before. But that’s precisely why Georgia has, I believe, the best shot of any of the past 14 teams in college football history who had a chance to join Minnesota in such rarified air.
First, Georgia will benefit from a fairly soft schedule this season, and I’m not saying that as a slight. You can only play who you can play, and given how these schedules are often decided years in advance, you can’t control how good a team is or isn’t by the time it’s time to play the game.
But an opener against Tennessee-Martin, followed by home games against Ball State, South Carolina and UAB will give the Dawgs plenty of time to get its new quarterback, along with other fresh roster faces, time to get acclimated before the first road test at Auburn on Sept. 30.
But even that game is against an Auburn squad that will be feeling its way through a coaching change with Hugh Freeze now at the helm. The rest of the conference schedule is pretty paltry. Of course there’s the Oct. 28 rivalry game with Florida in Jacksonville. But that one has lost some of its luster after the Gators fell to 14th-ranked Utah Thursday night.
Honestly, Georgia’s most difficult games this season don’t come until the end of the slate — Nov. 11 when Georgia hosts No. 22 Ole Miss and then Nov. 18 when the Dawgs travel to Knoxville to take on No. 12 Tennessee.
Georgia-Georgia Tech is another long-held rivalry, but that game hasn’t been competitive in years.
All told, it’s the perfect schedule for a two-time defending national champ trying to win a third straight with new, unproven, but talented pieces on its roster.
Another thing to consider is the playoff era. This will be the first time a team in the playoff era will have a chance to three-peat. That means, chances are far less likely than in times past that pollsters will have maximum impact on who shows up in the national championship game. It’s always best to prove such things on the field.
Of the preseason top 10 squads, I’d say Ohio State or Michigan alone have the best chance on paper to knock off Georgia in a playoff scenario. Alabama and LSU will be hanging around, and could even muck things up for the Dawgs if they meet in the SEC Championship game.
Either way, aside from Tennessee on the next-to-last regular season game of the year, it’ll take either the SEC title game or the playoffs to pair UGA up with a team capable of knocking them off. And by then, anything Georgia needs to figure out about itself as a team should be decided.
Finally, coaching and just overall program momentum may help tip Kirby Smart and company over the top for a third straight year. Despite the off-the-field drama, right now Smart seems to be living up to his last name in terms of how he coaches this team on the field, not to mention recruiting. And when a program finds that sweet spot, it tends to create a culture around it that just makes things fall into place in one way or another.
Georgia will likely be favored in every game it plays until it reaches the College Football Playoff. At that point, it’ll be all about how well Smart and his staff can get his troops ready to face teams that will, no doubt, be extra hungry to knock the Dawgs off their perch.
I pick them to do it. I think Tennessee will knock them off in an upset, but as has happened before, Georgia will bounce back in the SEC championship game and find its way back to the playoff. My championship sleepers both come out of the Big 10 this year — Michigan and Ohio State. And, of course, as long as Nick Saban is pacing the sidelines in Tuscaloosa, you’d be a fool to completely count Alabama out of any championship discussion.
The good news is, the time for preseason talk and prognostication is over. Let the three-peat journey begin.
Gabriel Stovall is the Sports Editor for The Augusta Press. He can be reached at gabriel@theaugustapress.com.
