ATLANTA — When the topic arose this week, Georgia center Sedrick Van Pran felt the lump in his throat grow. It almost brought him to tears the more he thought about it.
One note in particular stood out to him when he heard it.
Senior receiver Kearis Jackson committed to Georgia’s 2018 recruiting class 1,932 days ago. And for as much success as Georgia has enjoyed, it hadn’t won an SEC title since Jackson enrolled in January 2018.
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Outside No. 1 Georgia’s locker room, it was easy to cast Saturday’s game as meaningless. A loss, no matter the margin, wouldn’t have ejected the Bulldogs from the four-team College Football Playoff field. The most pragmatic minds among us might have advised Kirby Smart to rest his starters, lest they suffer an injury that kept them from participating in the Playoff.
But inside Georgia’s locker room? Saturday’s 50-30 win against No. 14 LSU meant plenty.
“Because of all those seniors in that locker room that didn’t win one. That was one of the last things that guys haven’t accomplished that we looked forward to accomplishing,” Van Pran said. “It came out in spurts this week, but it definitely came out a lot this week. We mentioned it a lot this week. … We really wanted to play for those guys.”
As for injury concerns, it’s worth noting receiver Ladd McConkey missed the second half after aggravating some tendonitis in his knee and watched the game’s remainder in sweatpants. But all in all, Georgia played, coached and performed like a team that considered a victory deeply meaningful.
“I told those kids, I don’t want one kid to walk out of our program without an SEC championship ring for their career. That was about to happen if we didn’t get that one,” Smart said. “They said enough was enough tonight. They got ’em one.”
Player after player, when asked what cashing in on this SEC title ring meant, kept using the same word: Seniors.
The possibility of Georgia’s departing seniors ending their careers without a conference title sounded akin to an unpardonable sin.
“There’s a big group of seniors who have been to this game a lot and it didn’t go the way they were hoping for,” sophomore linebacker Smael Mondon Jr. said. “So to get this done for them, to get this championship, means everything.”
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The Bulldogs can reset the clock on a goal that, because of Smart’s recruiting and management of a program that is college football’s newest superpower, is both attainable and astounding in its attainability.
And his current team has a chance to pull off a triple crown that’s happened only once in Athens since 1946: winning the SEC championship, winning the national championship and going undefeated.
Smart’s teams at Georgia have done one of those things in a season twice in six-plus years, but never all three in the same year. Now? Opportunity knocks.
The Bulldogs are two wins away from making it reality, and they’ll be favored to do it when the Playoff field is released on Sunday.
And therein lies the pressure that Georgia will face as it chases a national championship repeat. The win against LSU felt meaningful as it happened, but anything short of 15-0 and the rarified air of becoming the first repeat national title winner since Alabama in 2011-12 will change that.
Suddenly, it would become a blip on a season surely branded as disappointment. Georgia may not be quite the behemoth it was a season ago, but it has been the nation’s best team for nearly the entire fall. And Saturday’s mostly drama-less rout of LSU helped erase the memories of an embarrassing showing from a year ago, when Bryce Young won the Heisman Trophy on this same field at Georgia’s expense, costing the Bulldogs their case as the best defense in college football history. Georgia entered as a touchdown favorite and left as a loser by 17. This time, Georgia took care of business against the Tigers, winning by 20 as a 17-point favorite.
But crystallizing the memories of Saturday in history as truly meaningful requires finishing the job. A loss would make Saturday one of the most unsatisfying SEC titles in history, even for a program with just four SEC championships since 1982.
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And Georgia, to its credit, has a roster of athletes with a seemingly innate ability to enjoy the present without losing sight of the future.
“It feels amazing, but bittersweet. Of course you’re happy you played well and you were able to win,” van Pran said, “but the job isn’t done.”
(Photo of Kearis Jackson: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
