ATLANTA — So it turns out conference championships between two playoff-bound teams still have a whole lot of significance … especially if one of those teams looks very different after the game than it did before.
A year ago almost to the day, the college football world learned that sometimes, undefeated isn’t good enough to make the playoffs, if you lose your starting quarterback along the way. Georgia isn’t undefeated, not even close, and the Bulldogs also lost Carson Beck, their starting quarterback, in the SEC championship. How will Beck’s injury affect Georgia’s playoff possibilities going forward?
Georgia eliminated any need for a CFP selection committee judgment call by winning the SEC championship 22-19 in OT over a mistake-prone Texas. While it’s unlikely Georgia will fall out of a No. 2 seed, thanks to its strength of schedule, it’s possible. And it’s still an open question as to just how injured Beck is.
“He’s got an upper extremity injury,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said of Beck after the game. “We don’t know to what extent. Basically we looked at it in there. It looked OK. But he couldn’t have grip strength and throw the ball in the locker room. It was a little bit painful for that. We need to at the end of the day [find] out exactly what’s going on, have an MRI, look into it.”
Beck was injured on the final play of the first half, a chaotic sack and fumble that very nearly ended up as a Texas touchdown. Beck remained prone on the field for several seconds after taking the sack.
At the conclusion of halftime, three Georgia quarterbacks began warming up on the sideline, and none of them were Beck. Backup Gunner Stockton got the nod, and he immediately led a motivated Georgia offense to the first touchdown scored by either team on the afternoon. Later in the third quarter, Stockton drove Georgia deep into Texas territory and came away with a field goal.
“Of course it’s never a good thing when your starting quarterback goes out,” Georgia offensive guard Tate Ratledge said after the game. “I think it was big for everybody in the locker room to let Gunner know that we believed in him and had full confidence in him to get the job done.”
Texas, for its part, faced two foes on Saturday: Georgia, and its own repeated mistakes and penalties. Texas penalties kept Georgia in the game the first half, negating two interceptions and a made field goal. Texas errors, including two missed field goals, gave hope to the Georgia sideline and motivation to the overwhelmingly pro-Georgia crowd in Atlanta.
“The challenge in games like this is to maximize the opportunities when you get them,” Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said. “In the first half we had some great opportunities, and we just couldn’t capitalize the way we would have liked.”
And then came the fourth quarter, and these two teams remembered that they were playing for the championship of the mighty Southeastern Conference. Texas struck first, evening the score at 13 on a Quinn Ewers’ dart to DeAndre Moore for 41 yards and a touchdown.
On its very next drive, Georgia executed a flawless, gutsy fake punt on fourth-and-5, catching the Longhorn defense napping with an end-around run for 9 yards. Twice on the drive, Georgia fumbled the ball, and twice recovered its own fumble. Georgia controlled the ball for 9:22 of the fourth quarter, covering 72 yards in 16 plays, but couldn’t quite punch in the ball, and had to settle for a go-ahead field goal to put the score at 16-13.
So that put the ball in Ewers’ hands with 4:32 remaining and the SEC championship on the line … and Ewers promptly threw the ball straight into the hands of Georgia’s Daylen Everette. That marked Everette’s second interception of Ewers on the afternoon and gave Stockton the opportunity to bleed clock.
But then Stockton’s inexperience showed, to devastating effect. On a broken play, he heaved up a pass toward the Texas sideline that ended up in the hands of Texas’ Jahdae Barron. That gave Ewers another chance to prove himself. He came through with a clutch fourth-and-3 conversion with just over a minute left in the game, and his end-zone pass to Ryan Wingo drew a critical pass-interference call on Georgia that put the ball at the Georgia 14 with 35 seconds remaining.
Ewers couldn’t put the ball into the end zone, and that meant Texas’ fate would rely on the foot of kicker Bert Auburn, who had missed twice already. His 36-yard attempt flew true, tying the game at 16 with 18 seconds remaining.
In overtime, Texas took the ball first. Ewers misfired on pass after end-zone pass, and again the Longhorns had to settle for a field goal attempt. Again, Auburn converted, this time from 27 yards out, to give the Longhorns a 19-16 lead.
That put the ball in Stockton’s hands again. After guiding the Bulldogs down to the Texas 12, he took off and ran the ball himself, taking a vicious, helmet-loosening hit from Texas’ Andrew Mukuba at the 4-yard line. One play later, Trevor Etienne forced his way into the end zone for a 22-19 Georgia victory. (Beck, still in pads, subbed onto the field to hand the ball off on the game-winning play, but he was noticeably uncomfortable.)
The question now facing Georgia is how injured Beck is, and what effect that might have on the perception of the Bulldogs. Injuries and speculative effects shouldn’t impact a school’s seeding … but as 2023 showed, injuries can negate an entire season’s work in the eyes of the CFP selection committee.
Last year, Florida State finished the regular season undefeated and won the ACC championship despite the fact that it lost quarterback Jordan Travis to season-ending injury along the way. When selecting the members of the four-team bracket, the College Football Playoff selection committee decided that Travis’ absence made Florida State a materially worse team and selected Alabama as the fourth seed instead.
Georgia didn’t suffer an immediate quality drop-off after Beck left the game; indeed, the Bulldogs looked far sharper in the third quarter around Stockton than they had all first half around Beck. But the late fourth-quarter interception was a brutal blow that allowed Texas to tie the game and force overtime. Fortunately for Georgia and Stockton — and unlike last week’s eight-overtime victory against Georgia Tech — the Bulldogs only needed one overtime period to erase that mistake and claim the SEC title.
