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ESPN lays out simple path for Georgia football to get to College Football Playoff
Kirby Smart will never say Georgia is thinking about the College Football Playoff. Jake Fromm will only want to go 1-0 each week. Players will reiterate they’re focused on what Georgia is doing and not how a handful of programs around the country will spend their Saturdays.
But that won’t stop those in the national media from making playoff projections and circling a Georgia-Alabama SEC championship game that is not yet on the official schedule.
On Monday, ESPN laid out a path to the College Football Playoff for each team ranked in the AP Poll. For some teams, it required a number of scenarios to break the right way.
For Georgia, ESPN’s Mark Schlabach laid out a straight-forward scenario for the Bulldogs to make it back to the College Football Playoffs in 2019. Just beat the Crimson Tide.
Related: Georgia debuts at No. 3 in first 2019 AP Poll
“Is this the year the Bulldogs break through,” Schlabach asked. “All they have to do is get past Alabama, a thorn in their side the past two seasons, first in the CFP National Championship Game and then in the SEC championship game last season. Both times you could argue they’ve been the better team only to lose in come-from-behind fashion.”
Of course, it won’t really be that simple for the Bulldogs in 2019. Just to get to a potential rematch against Alabama, Georgia will have to play and beat No. 8 Florida, No. 9 Notre Dame, No. 12 Texas A&M and No. 16 Auburn. That doesn’t include road trips to Vanderbilt and Tennessee coming before mid-October.
In each of the past two seasons, Georgia has stumbled during the regular season. Both of those defeats were of the ugliest fashion, as the Bulldogs lost 40-17 to Auburn in 2017 and then fell 36-16 at LSU last year. Given the nature of college football, it is more probable than not that Georgia gets tripped up at some point this season.
For all the talent Smart has acquired at Georgia there are still some major question marks. The biggest occur at wide receiver and defensive line. There’s also the fact that Georgia must replace its two best defensive players from 2018 in Deandre Baker and D’Andre Walker.
This is the part of the story where I mention Georgia should be able to answer most of those questions. Having Jake Fromm at quarterback and perhaps the best offensive line in football allows you to do that. And there are now 5-star prospects at every level of the defense.
Georgia won’t have a stated goal of making it to the College Football Playoff this year. It will talk about winning the SEC East, something it has done the past two years and is favored to do so again in 2019. Should the Bulldogs get to Atlanta, it’ll make winning the SEC a goal as well. Winning the SEC has gotten a team into the College Football Playoff in every season.
Of course, Alabama showed in 2017 that it wasn’t a requirement to make it into the College Football Playoff. And that could be the case again in 2019, should Georgia matchup with an LSU team that beat Alabama and gave the Crimson Tide their only loss of the regular season.
Right now, Georgia isn’t focused on beating Alabama. Or really even making the College Football Playoff.
Simply put, the Bulldogs are just looking ahead to the next game, which comes on Aug. 31 against Vanderbilt.
WATCH: Matthew Boling dusts Georgia football team in relay race
The Georgia football team is filled with guys who would be classified as incredibly fast. Eric Stokes, Tyson Campbell and Demetris Robertson are just some of the burners on the team.
But after what the Georgia football team Twitter account put out Monday night, it’s clear that all of them would struggle to keep up with Matthew Boling.
For those who don’t regularly use the internet, Boling is a viral track sensation and a freshman sprinter on the Georgia track team. Boling hopes to qualify for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and there’s probably a good chance that he will.
On Monday, Smart challenged the Georgia football players to a 4X100 relay against the Georgia coaches. Running for the players was offensive tackle Warren McClendon, cornerback Ameer Speed, defensive tackle Tymon Mitchell and safety Richard LeCounte.
The first three players built a nice lead for LeCounte. The problem was that Smart swapped himself out for Boling.
And as the track sensation has often done, he ran down the man in front of him and made it look quite easy. This time, that man happened to be a preseason All-SEC safety.
One of the highlights of the video was junior wide receiver Trey Blount struggling to comprehend how someone could be as fast as Boling.
“There’s no reason he’s that fast,” Blount said. “How is he that fast?”
We don’t have a good answer as to why Boling is as good as he is at sprinting. But we are glad he’s doing it for the University of Georgia.
More Georgia football stories from around DawgNation
- Opposing coach takes leave of absence as wife’s cancer worsens
- Georgia football podcast: ESPN personality predicts UGA to win national championship
- WATCH: Zamir White runs through another Georgia linebacker in drill video
- Georgia football’s new DC Dan Lanning ‘outside the box,’ impressing Kirby Smart
- 5 takeaways from Georgia football Scrimmage Two: Pass game pivotal
- Kirby Smart praises Jarvis Jones as he helps Georgia’s outside linebackers
- Georgia coach Kirby Smart: RB Kenny McIntosh ‘delivered some blows to people’
- Georgia football injury update: Kirby Smart updates Nakobe Dean, senior D-Linemen
