At 12-1 on the year, only three teams scored over fourteen points on Georgia this season, only two even cracking twenty. While explosive UGA scored twenty-eight or more in ten games and more than forty in six games, plus thirty-eight at Tech. Nearly half the time hitting forty suggests we can hit that number on a suspect Oklahoma defense. Baker Mayfield and company being the fourth team to get more than two touchdowns also seems likely.

 

What can’t happen again is what happened only once this year, at Auburn: Georgia gets a lower than average offensive output while yielding a bunch of points. OU outscores everybody, but we’ve given up two touchdowns total in our last two games. All-American Roquan Smith can move up the NFL draft board a little by doing what he has done all year, under the watchful eyes of the entire nation. For the record, I absolutely hated what happened last year on New Year’s Day. Never oh never should a college football marathon not be televised on our big national holiday. We took a day off from bowls for the NFL to compete for Wildcards and whatnot. Don’t mess with it!

 

The University of Georgia is 5-2 against the Big 12 and undefeated in the Rose Bowl, having played in it way back in January of 1943 to cap the national championship season of 1942. That team lost only once, to Auburn, and won in Pasadena 9-0 over UCLA. 1942 was a split (disputed by various awarding bodies) national championship – very common before the formation of the BCS and not uncommon at all before the formation of the CFP.

 

Ridiculous that college football insists on such tiny baby steps, while every other sport on any level in the whole wide world gets it right. Any argument against playoff expansion is flaccid copycat myopic idiocy, at best. As crazy as it sounds, the playoffs already exist in college football. In a game not locally televised live for some stupid reason, Kennesaw State was just eliminated late the other night, while we sat around doing nothing after Army-Navy. We’d have to give up a regular season game, maybe, the only valid argument I’ve heard against. Would you miss the cupcakes? You’ll get to get back to me on that next year, when we play three of them as home games that could have instead been entertaining football: Austin Peay, Middle Tennessee State, UMass. Dawgs win!

 

For many years after real national championship games did first occur, the Pac-12, which had ten teams back when the number in your conference’s name actually signified the number of teams in the league, had their occasional national champion caliber teams not play in the would-be national championship 1-2 games, instead remaining loyal to old affiliations and playing in The Grandaddy of Them All, the Rose Bowl, against the Big 10, back when it had ten teams, and occasional national champion strength ones. The Big 10 and Big 12 have had varied numbers of teams and different members over the past relatively recent seasons, confusing an already confused situation further.

 

Entering the CFP, both football teams in the 2-3 matchup are at least hot enough to solidly have been voted in there. Unlike some previous CFP meetings, both sides here look to me to be clearly supposed to be there. Actually, of the four entrants, only Bama was suspect, and they’ve lost three total games in three years, none blowouts. Don’t let anybody fool you, though, by suggesting Clemson-Bama III was anything other than a made for television event. If I had any affiliation to UCF or the Pac-12 or the Big 10, or the Big 12 for that matter who either gets Oklahoma in or is always left out, I’d tell the NCAA that we want out of the CFP right now.

 

See, I highly value fairness. Would it really bother you if USC and Ohio State and UCF made the playoffs, too, this year, and we played in say the Cotton Bowl a week before the Rose Bowl? Nah, you want Austin Peay.

 

The 3 seed, Georgia has a better than average shot to win the game 1/1/18 in greater Los Angeles, having gone 12-1 in the whole calendar year of 2017. It’s been a great one, folks, so don’t forget to remain grateful. And, we are on to Pasadena. I started talking about Georgia in the Rose Bowl this summer, and here I am plane-gating in at 8:59 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on the day of the game, on a direct flight from the World’s Busiest Airport. Taking public transit, like I truly love to do. Taking a Metro train to Pasadena – a lovely place – from historic Union Station. Sitting 5th row with my new friends of the San Diego UGA Alumni Association, Tara Shah President. Before I kick it for a few days in LA. The first night, I’ll be back out near LAX at the Hilton, eventually, partying with Merv Waldrop in Venice Beach. Then, I’m staying with my dude Mike Tom at his place in the city, have a few tacos, you know.

 

Gonna write about it.

 

 

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