Shit, shit, shit.
Awful, awful news. And it could have been worse.
Offensive lineman Warren McClendon was in the car and sustained light injuries. He has been released from the hospital. A second Georgia recruiting staffer remains in the ICU.
A sad ending to a day of celebration. Life ain’t fair sometimes. I hope their teammates and families can find some peace eventually.
Filed under Georgia Football
Bennett got busy on the lengthy, specially-created Dawg Walk route from Lumpkin through the Zell Miller Learning Center quadrangle and Tate Center Bookstore plaza. He stopped for pictures with fans, played a Redcoat Band members’ trumpet and grabbed a drum-liners sticks and ratta-tatted out a few beats before hustling inside the stadium.
How it continued.
How it’s going.
That’s an exaggeration, but there’s no question a significant chunk of the fanbase took an extremely long time, if ever at all, to warm to the idea of Stetson Bennett, IV, Georgia starting quarterback. But put that to the side for the moment. What about the media that seemed to skip back and forth from “oh, what a cute story he is” to “he’s only there because Georgia is loaded” at the drop of a hat? And that’s not an exaggeration. Here’s something Josh Pate posted before the national championship game:
And if you think everybody got to where Pate was after Bennett’s scintillating fourth quarter in the Peach Bowl, think again.
You don’t know where his mindset’s at? He flat out told us after the national championship win.
Georgia football quarterback Stetson Bennett did a postgame press conference Monday night following his second national championship game MVP performance and put on a headset to talk to ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt on a mostly cleared-out SoFi Stadium field.
“I told them when the whistle sounds, my obligations to the media are done to the University of Georgia,” Bennett told Van Pelt on air. “I’m going to go have fun and celebrate.”
More power to him for that. He has zero obligations to a media that was skeptical he had it in him to be the story he is today.
As for that portion of the fan base that has their panties in a wad because they don’t feel the love from Bennett they believe they deserve, c’mon, guys. I’m not saying it was 90% of Dawgnation, but, shit, we’ve got all the social media receipts. There were plenty of Georgia fans ready to move on to the next shiny toy at starting quarterback last spring, and they weren’t shy about making their preferences known.
So, while I think Seth Emerson ($$) is right that some of what Stetson was coming with yesterday has its roots in the mindset that Kirby Smart instilled in this team to drive them to their second natty,
This Georgia football team was good at many things, and perhaps its best ability was creating false narratives. Some programs pretend not to hear the noise. Georgia makes up noise that doesn’t exist.
“Y’all burn us. You keep telling us how bad we are,” Stetson Bennett said Saturday at the team’s national championship celebration. “Y’all didn’t want to believe it, because, it makes no sense to me. Screw it, we’ve got two rings.”
… some of it comes from basic human nature. It’s impossible for me to blame him for that.
Bottom line, this comes from the same place that amateurism romance is sourced from. These are young men playing a game at a high level, and that’s something many of us plebes would give our right arms to do. With that comes the illusion that they should be grateful for the opportunity and accept it on the same level that we, in our dreams, would, including blind love for the fan base that roots for the program.
That’s not how it works, though. These athletes succeed precisely because they’re not like us. They have athletic skills we don’t have. They have an inner drive that we lack. And while they may appreciate the fan base — and they do, to varying degrees — that doesn’t motivate them as much as self-belief, competition, program culture and loyalty to their teammates do. Some may hide that from the public eye better than others do. Stetson’s in a place where he no longer feels the need to do so. If anyone is upset with him for that, I suspect he’d say that’s not his problem. And he’s right.
Filed under Georgia Football
Welp, this article didn’t go where I thought it was going. I was prepared to unload a massive amount of snark on the suggestion that the Vols were the only real obstacle to keeping Georgia out of the ’23 CFP, but all Toppmeyer wound up with was this:
Supreme talent usually rules the day, though, and few, if any, teams will match Georgia’s 2023 assembly.
Tennessee won’t match that assemblage, but scheme and a rabid crowd can be a bit of an equalizer.
More likely, the Vols become a taller hurdle than most but a hurdle that Georgia nonetheless clears in prolonging its rule.
Or to put it another way,
Get The Picture 