It’s come down to this. The national championship in college football features a couple of familiar faces, one a little more familiar than the other but both familiar to each other.
And frankly, Georgia is perhaps a little too familiar with Alabama. An underlying story is bound to be whether or not the Bulldogs can finally knock off a nemesis, although the Crimson Tide have been a nemesis to a lot of teams over the years.
While Georgia has long been a great program, they haven’t been a national power as often as some others. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, after Vince Dooley, they were a good program but often an also-ran among the elite ones in the SEC. Mark Richt had a better run, though they trended down late in his tenure and were largely irrelevant. Kirby Smart, who coached under Richt in 2005, has brought them up to an elite level, going 65-15 to this point with a 5-2 mark in bowl/postseason games.
But they can’t get past Alabama.
No doubt, few programs have succeeded in getting past the Crimson Tide over the years and especially of late, so Georgia is hardly alone. One of the bluebloods in the sport, Alabama has been in the College Football Playoff all but one year (2019) it has existed and is in their sixth championship game in those seven appearances. Nick Saban has kept them right there among the elite programs during his tenure even as everyone guns for them.
Along the way, Georgia is one of the challengers Alabama has consistently vanquished. After their SEC championship win last month, Alabama has now won seven in a row against the Bulldogs, with only one of those games being played in Tuscaloosa. Four have come in Atlanta in the form of three SEC championship games and a national championship game. Georgia was agonizingly close in the national championship game three years ago, when Alabama won on a touchdown on second down and 26, and just 11 months later in another SEC championship game they led 28-14 in the third quarter before losing 35-28.
Since then, the two teams haven’t been close in their last two matchups, a pair of 41-24 wins for the Crimson Tide. Last month, one might have thought this was the Bulldogs’ chance to break through, as they were the best team all regular season long and Alabama had looked vulnerable at times aside from losing at Texas A&M. But the Crimson Tide were the clearly better team, making an elite defense look quite ordinary along the way, and in light of that it’s mildly surprising that Vegas has Georgia as slight favorites.
At the end of the day, Alabama still beat Georgia, and did so convincingly. They did it with the best player in the country, Heisman Trophy winner Bryce Young, who along with his explosive offense took control of the game. If Young wasn’t already going to win that award, he certainly cemented it in that game.
So to recap: Alabama beat Georgia at home, they beat them in Athens, and they have their number at neutral sites. Alabama has knocked off the Bulldogs when they were supposed to, when they were supposedly vulnerable, when they had their backs to the wall and took the redshirt off a quarterback for what would turn out to be just one play, and when the Bulldogs had been the best team in college football all year and had a nationally dominant defense.
It’s one game, so anything can happen. And the streak has to end sometime – right? Even Michigan was bound to beat Ohio State again someday, and they did that over a month ago. For Georgia, this would be a pretty good time to put an end to the streak.