ATHENS, Ga. — There’s no great way to segue from the sad news of last weekend back into pure football talk, so let’s not try. This week’s mailbag will be light on humor and frivolity but hopefully still informative and helpful.
As always, some questions have been edited for length and clarity:
Does UGA retire Stetson Bennett’s number? How is that decision made? — Stephen W.
Retiring the number is very unlikely. It hasn’t been done since Herschel Walker, which happened the year after he went pro, and eventually an unofficial decision was made by the school to stop doing it. This came up after David Pollack’s career but Georgia didn’t do it. There’s a very practical reason: You’ll start to run out of numbers. This is already a team that doubles up on numbers, offense and defense. Mykel Williams also wore No. 13 this year, and he would have to switch jerseys if Bennett’s were retired. Plus, all the number-switching that already goes on, Zion Logue’s having to switch jerseys before field goals and extra points because he was on the field with Jack Podlesny, and both wear No. 96.
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Georgia created the Circle of Honor in 1996 as its way of honoring greats, in all sports, inducting between three and five Georgia athletes or coaches every year. But you have to graduate to make it, which is why Walker isn’t in it and why Kevin Butler wasn’t inducted until 2019 after getting his degree via his stint as a very high-profile student assistant with the team.
Bennett certainly would be worthy of the Circle of Honor, but he also seems deserving of more. That’s why the idea of a statue, endorsed by teammates like Kearis Jackson, seems appropriate. Bennett’s story and accomplishments, everything, make it a no-brainer.
By the way, No. 13 was not the only jersey Bennett wore at Georgia: He wore No. 22 when he was a true freshman and a walk-on. Find a way to get that on his statue, maybe No. 13 on the front and No. 22 on the back, as a fitting way to honor his entire journey.
Stetson Bennett, left, wrapped up his Georgia career with a second straight national title. (Jayne Kamin-Oncea / USA Today)I struggled to research this on my own, and I’m hoping the crack staff at The Athletic can help. Is 2022 Georgia the first time a team beat another team from each Power 5 conference? I looked at past BCS and CFP champs and couldn’t find anyone else. It’s an interesting nugget that would counter the national narrative we often hear about out-of-conference scheduling. — Mark C.
You were on to something: Since the current Power 5/Group of 5 alignment debuted in 2014, Georgia is the only FBS team to beat teams from all five Power 5 conferences in the same season. The last FBS school to beat teams from at least five major conferences in the same season was 2001 Miami: Big East (its own conference), Big Ten (Penn State), ACC (Florida State), Pac-10 (Washington) and Nebraska (Big 12).
Credit to Jason Starrett, editor extraordinaire at The Athletic. Notre Dame was the program most likely to also have done it, but it hasn’t during that time. The definition of power conference has changed through the years, but the Big East was one of the six automatic qualifier conferences from 1998 to 2012.
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When the College Football Playoff field expands to 12, there’s a better chance someone will do it, considering the eventual champion will have to go through more opponents. But that’s also coinciding with conferences — at least the SEC — probably going to nine games, which means less room for marquee nonconference games. What’s unknown is whether teams schedule up to impress the committee, or whether others do the opposite, figuring they have more margin of error. For instance, when Kirby Smart scheduled the likes of Oklahoma, Texas, Clemson, Ohio State, etc., I think he knew a 12-team schedule was probably coming but didn’t know the SEC was going to expand, thus increasing the chances of a nine-game schedule. It’ll be interesting to see it all play out.
As great as Kirby is, an argument can be made that he started the wrong QB in every season opener until this past year.
2016: Greyson Lambert over Jacob Eason
2017: Eason over Jake Fromm
2018: Fromm over Justin Fields (has this been debated at all?)
2019: Fromm over Bennett
2020: D’Wan Mathis over Bennett
2021: JT Daniels over Bennett
Given all that, how confident should we be that he and Monken can get it right this time? — Patrick H.
OK, I don’t want to jump down your throat here, but there is some serious hindsight going on here. First off, in 2016 the coaches already had decided to go with Eason, they just wanted to ease him in so they didn’t start him in his debut, especially against North Carolina. Eason got the start in Week 2 and did well enough as a freshman — not great, but OK for a freshman — that I don’t remember anybody suggesting they instead start Fromm, who was also a true freshman. Ditto for a year later, when for all the revisionist history that exists nobody was saying Fields should supplant Fromm right away, and only a few were making that argument at any point later. (Like many similar things, many people now say they were arguing for that at the time, but in reality, few were.)
As for Bennett’s not getting the job for the next three years, well, we’ve gone over that story many times, haven’t we? There was no argument to do so in 2019, but you certainly could fault the staff in 2020. But a year later, nobody was arguing for Bennett over Daniels, such that when Bennett — rather than Carson Beck — started Week 2, there was a hailstorm of social media grief from the fans. I remember. I was there. (But Bennett was not booed at the stadium when he was announced as a starter. I was there, I remember that, too.)
The one year Patrick didn’t list was 2022, when Bennett entered the season as the unquestioned starter. Yes, it took forever for Todd Monken and Smart to come around, but they did before many others did. So given that, the coaches probably deserve the benefit of the doubt. Not that their decision this year should be automatically accepted and immune from hindsight criticism. We shall see!
I hear a lot of chatter in podcasts and online that MOST Georgia fans didn’t want Bennett to start this past season or we continued to doubt his abilities. They claim Georgia fans changed their tune at some point midseason. I don’t remember this at all. Sure, there were SOME fans who still doubted Bennett after last season, but it wasn’t MOST. — David P.
You are correct. That’s partly my own anecdotal sense and also from the survey we did last spring: 83.9 percent of Georgia fans said they wanted Bennett to be the starter in 2022. Now the numbers went down to a slight plurality when you asked the question of who should be the starter at the end of the season: 49.7 percent said Bennett, and Brock Vandagriff had just over a third of the votes. (Very little hope for Beck, as it turned out.)
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So the best way to put it is there were still some holdouts on Bennett’s ceiling. But it’s a good bet if you took that survey after the Oregon game that the percentage on the second question would have shot up considerably.
Georgia fans had their doubts but they came around on Bennett. Most of the criticism I saw during the past year was from people outside Georgia. And even most of them came around, too. How could you not?
Has the UGA coaching staff pioneered a quantifiable way of measuring character in players they are recruiting? It seems that is constant between the initial star rating and the development of UGA players the past few years. — Josh C.
Will Muschamp, when he came to Georgia two years ago, told his brother, Mike, that what stood out to him the most was that Georgia had good character players. That was coming off the 8-2 season, so it somewhat belies any idea that winning breeds character and that’s the secret sauce. Smart said this the morning after the national championship, that he thinks the ultimate difference in athleticism among players is small, adding:
“I want intangibles. I want him to have this and that and this and that. … We’ve been fortunate to make some good decisions on kids that maybe other programs didn’t value their intangibles enough.” How they’ve done that, Smart offered one clue: “They hate to lose. These guys (Javon Bullard and Brock Bowers were sitting next to him) hate to lose against each other day in and day out.” He also mentioned in general players’ having “the right mental makeup.”
Now if Georgia has pioneered a quantifiable way of measuring that, then it’s not going to reveal it for competitive reasons. It’s almost certainly just a process of gathering as much personal information as it can and then making judgment calls. But it’s also probably not the only factor.
The better programs recruit, and the wider the area they recruit, the easier it is to pass on players with questionable character. They can afford to weed out the bad apples. But they also can take chances on players as Georgia did with Derion Kendrick two years ago. That’s where culture comes in: Georgia has built this up through seven years and benefits from continuity behind the scenes, with character and development players like Jonas Jennings, Scott Sinclair and Bryant Gantt.
We’re already seeing a lot of chatter about Georgia’s path to another CFP because of our schedule. We are replacing a quarterback, offensive linemen, our best running back and our kicker. I believe our coaches are amazing evaluators and developers. But I’m not willing to overlook the challenge this year in replacing those points. It feels even more steep a climb than losing all those bodies on defense in 2022. — Kraig B.
The nature of college football is that everybody is going to have holes entering the next season. The reason so many are forecasting a three-peat is Georgia seemed to have so many holes — all together now, 15 players picked in the NFL Draft — and yet had an even more impressive year. Georgia has gone from people saying, “We’ll believe it when we see it” to “Georgia is the pick until proven otherwise.”
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As we sit here right now, Georgia projects to return 14 of the players who started in the national championship, seven on each side of the ball. But two of the departures — Bennett and Jalen Carter — could leave holes unlike what last year’s team experienced: a new quarterback and a difference-maker on defense who Smart said gives the defense the ability to play at another level.
Two things, however, provide a huge reason for optimism: the program’s talent base and the schedule. Muschamp told me before the national championship that the offense’s domination gave the defense some time to jell and mature. (People act like the defense was great right away, but the offense scored touchdowns the first seven times it touched the ball against Oregon and didn’t cool off much the next two games, which took a lot of pressure off Georgia’s young defense.) This year, the schedule is so easy on the front end that the entire team, including the new starting quarterback, will have time to get things together.
That doesn’t automatically mean a three-peat. But it means Georgia could be a consensus No. 1 preseason pick. (Tough to twist that into people’s doubt of the Bulldogs. But Smart will find a way.)
(Top photo: Kohjiro Kinno / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
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