With all due respect, Connor Riley asks the wrong “what if?” question here.
The better question to ask is “what if Kirby Smart hadn’t flipped Jake Fromm to Georgia?“.
Sure, there’s the matter of how the 2017 season would have played out after Eason’s injury, but there’s much more.
Georgia would have had better class spacing between quarterbacks to sell Justin Fields on. Alabama would have been a tougher sell for Tagovailoa. Would Fromm have been as good a match for the more wide open offense the Tide adopted with Tua? If Tua had gone to Tuscaloosa anyway and won out, would it have been Fromm in the transfer portal?
We’ll never know.
Get The Picture 
My old man “You can’t look up a dead horse’s ass”!
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Really respect Eason and wish him well, but if he would not have gotten hurt and remained starter in ’17, IMO we would not have had near the success as we did with Fromm. First, Eason just doesn’t seem to have ‘it,’ and he never felt comfortable in the pocket. His accuracy was inconsistent as well.
Furthermore, Eason doesn’t seem to have the leadership qualities that Fromm has, and you’d hear stories about how teammates naturally gravitated to Fromm even before the injury/change occured.
We’ll never know obviously what would have been, but IMO Fromm becoming the starter worked out better for us in the long run. That is, unless you’d want to sacrifice the ’17 for the chance to still have Fields on the roster.
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2017 was a special season, so it’s hard to give that up. Who would have been the back up that started the ND game once Eason was out?
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I wouldn’t exchange 2017 for anything. Regardless of what happens to Jake Fromm, that season will make it where he’ll never have to buy a drink in Georgia again.
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There with you, ee, and I wish we wouldn’t even bring up his name during hard times. Does nothing but create angst. Jake is the horse we rode in on.
The problem is with the team being down and pulling Jake with them. It will improve.
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Ah, Certitude in all its glory!
I appreciate as much as anyone what Fromm did in 2017 and he will always deserve every praise he gets for how he did. The 2017 was one of the sweetest in my 6 decades of following Georgia football.
But Eason beat out Fromm in head to head competition and the coaches praised Eason in August for his improvement from 2016. We wouldn’t have “sacrificed “ the 2017 season if the guy who won the starting job was the starter for the year. Neither one of us knows the alternative ending but we had two excellent QBs to lead us.
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Nothing about my post resembled any measure of certitude. I threw in ‘IMO’ twice and even said ‘we’ll never know for sure.’ In other words, pure speculation.
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While we’re pointing out the blurring of lines between what’s knowable versus speculative, I’m not so sure that Kirby’s declaring Eason as the starter to start the ‘17 season is some definitive assessment of the two players. A largely conservative head coach coming off a poor opening season is likely to start Season 2 with the guy with 13 starts over the true freshman with none. Given that few, if any, of us viewed all the practice reps Spring and preseason 2017, who knows how QB reps with the Ones were allocated and whether Eason was clearly outplaying Fromm. My sense from 2016 and 2017 game reps is that the only advantage Eason had over Fromm is height and arm strength, so count me in the camp of those who believe Fromm was essential to get us to the brink of a CFPNC. I also believe Fromm was a big part of our offensive decline in 2019, but I don’t confuse my opinions with facts.
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Fair enough point about Eason’s advantage in preseason 2017 due to being the returning starter. I do recall, though, the sports reporters saying the coaches were happy with Eason’s improvement over 2016. As you point out, I did not watch any practice and I cannot refute the positive reports we were getting in the summer of 2017.
Certainly Fromm got us to a lead in overtime off the final game in the 2017 season, and that is a great accomplishment on his part. What I am not willing to concede is whether we would NOT have gotten to that point with Eason as QB.
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Agree.
The “if onlys” work both ways.
Had that season progressed under Eason, chances are that Georgia would not have had the same level of success as it did under JF. The program’s “brand” would have been diminished from what Fromm and Co. built and recruiting may have been less successful.
Maybe we lose to UF trice? (JF has been magnificent against the Gators)
and we could be back behind that eight ball.
There was a movie made quite a few years back where a modern US aircraft carrier operating near Hawaii entered a storm and was time warped back to Dec. 7, 1941. With modern jets and weapons and radar, there arose the dilemma, “We can easily defeat the Japanese (or was it the Germans, Bluto?) and prevent the disaster that was PH , but if we do, then in all likelihood we will change history to the point that we will have never existed” (or something like that). And if they never existed, then they would not be there to change history anyway. So the bottom line, is you can’t change history or even imagine in reality what changed history would look like in the present. There are just too many factors. If history was changed, we’d never know it because it wouldn’t have even been changed..it’s history. In the end, for the sake of cinema, the modern ship and aircraft did attack the Japanese WW2 fleet …F14s against Zeros and all of that…I think the movie is “Final Countdown”. Silly, but thought provoking.
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Geez, Ugly, your post posits a lot of speculation as being inevitable. I have no ability to acesertain whether we would have had the same success under Eason as Fromm, but concluding that we would have had less success under the QB who beat Fromm out is a reverse engineering of a premise to support a conclusion you want.
I figure the coaches see the players more than I do, and if they anoint one as a starter over the other I figure it is because the coaches believe the team will win more with that guy as the starter.
We know what happened when Fromm took over and it was great, but it does mean Eason could not have done as well or better.
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You’re correct. But the magic of ’17 was just that. And I don’t know if changing a key component (QB) would have been worse..but it would have also had to have been magic to equal it.
This is certainly a different kind of useless discussion, huh?
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Yeah, it is sort of useless 🙂
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That one was a stinker, for sure. Came out around ’77 maybe?
If I had to pick a time travel movie I’d go with the original Terminator ….
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Time to get Back to the Future.
Fromm lights up Baylor and wins it all in ’20.
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2017 the outlier year for Kirby Smart and his offensive staff.
QBs come and go, as do coaches.
2018, Chaney and Pittman. We all know how that season played out at the end. No cherry on top.
2019. Coley and Pittman. We all know how this season is playing out. Who said history does not repeat itself. Ask Georgia folks.
Rumors at end of season of a change in offense. We’ve all heard that story before. Yes, Georgia folks you have been lulled again.
This weekend two playoff teams go at…both starting QBs from the state of Georgia. Since 2014 2 5 stars have been in the rotation and left.
Take heart, buy a cheap Sugar Bowl ticket and support the AD.
After all we are Georgia, and we have Smart, Coley, and half the offense not there.
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Hire Rush Propst and we’ll win the national title every year.
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Along with The Fulmer Cup.
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He might win it all by himself … that would be a Bulldog point of pride!
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If we’re going to Whatifland, one other thing to consider is that we came very very close to landing Trevor Lawrence. Imagine no Fromm, no Fields, and going straight from Eason to Lawrence.
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Not sure what Riley still being a horrible writer has to do with anything, but if Jake Fromm doesn’t hang around and win it all next season there will always be some who think his very existence has kept Georgia from reaching the ultimate goal that has eluded us for so long. Of course a 2017 title would have nullified all of that.
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What if Parrish had jammed Smith at the line and Sanders hadn’t been slow to get off the hash and makes a pick? Would that have changed 18 and 19 at all?
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Who knows, and Smart would have flipped another QB or brought one in as a grad transfer if Fromm didn’t go to Athens.
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IF a frog had pockets he’d carry pistols and shoot snakes.
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Bama went to the wider open offense because of Tua and the WR.
We ran our O based on our QB and more directly due to our (lack of high end/early departures by…)WR .
Do people not remember how prolific we were with Jake and the talent surrounding him the last two years? Hollomans bone headed decision, the TE transferring, and Real Deal jr leaving early – imo those key personnel losses were more impactful than anybody could have imagined.
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UGA’s passing game with Fromm at QB has never been prolific. Using yards per game we ranked 106th in 2017, 73rd in 2018, and 76th this year.
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And what about Eason 2016?
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Isn’t this basically the plot of The Man in The High Castle?
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The “what if” game is better spent on this OC’s scheme and the full WR/TE roster for 2020-21 season moving forward. Everything else Kirby has a good grasp on.
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No
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Eason would have tipped the pass in the endzone, held the edge and sacked Hurts, made the kick against USCe and caught the deep balls from Fromm to get an early jump on LSU. Kirby screwed-up again.
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