Kirby Smart is not yet Nick Saban. He has only two national titles to Saban's seven. He has two conference titles to Saban's 11. He has plenty of work to do in regard to all-time greatness.
Saban, however, has never done that.
Smart's Georgia Bulldogs on Monday night won their second straight College Football Playoff National Championship, humiliating TCU 65-7. It was the largest scoring margin in bowl history and their 29th win in 30 games. The Dawgs joined 2018 Clemson and 2019 LSU as the third team to finish a season 15-0, and the resounding nature of their title-game win dwarfed even Alabama's most dominant moments.
From a power rankings standpoint, TCU isn't the second-best team in the country. The Horned Frogs, however, are still one of the 10 or so best, and Georgia treated them like a Division III team. The playcalling was perfect, testing TCU's 3-3-5 defense on the edges where it's most vulnerable. The execution was so good that some blockers on key plays couldn't even find anyone to block. TCU's defense created exactly the sort of third-and-longs it needed to create, and Georgia converted them, moving the chains on third-and-10, third-and-11 and third-and-15 and going 9-for-13 overall. TCU needed to force a couple of turnovers to put itself in position to succeed, and Georgia ended up plus-3.
TCU just didn't have the dudes. Once this Georgia team showed up, nothing else mattered.
The Dawgs finish the 2022 season having only really been tested twice. They played five games against teams ranked 11th or better in the AP poll at the time, and they won four of them by an average score of 48-13. Only Ohio State in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl semifinal (a 42-41 win) and, strangely, SEC East foe Missouri (26-22 in Columbia in October) were able to stay within single digits. Georgia battled injuries to stars for much of the season, but it had such depth that it didn't matter. This was a season of historic dominance, and it completed one of the most dominant two-year stretches of our lifetimes.
Going 29-1 over a two-season span -- with the only loss coming against a team it then defeated in the national title game -- is nearly unprecedented. The 1944-45 Army teams, with a roster plumped up by World War II enrollment, were unbeaten and nearly untested, but they also had to win only 18 games in two years; Georgia almost did that in 2022 alone!
Sticking to just the past 50 years, college football's modern era with integrated rosters and true freshman eligibility, only one school can claim to have done something more impressive than what we just saw. And I'm not sure even that claim holds up.
