Before cruising, the Bulldogs built a 28-3 lead at halftime over the 11th-ranked Ducks. And Oregon didn’t score again. Yeah, it was that ugly.
ATLANTA — In December, the last time Georgia swaggered into Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Bulldog faithful fell all but silent long before the end.
There were few, if any, callings of the Dawgs as that Southeastern Conference championship game became a debacle, and no roars for a Georgia trophy presentation. In fact, by the end of an evening with a double-digit loss to Alabama, there were not all that many Georgia fans left.
Nine months — and, despite that December night, one national championship win over Alabama — later, Georgia soundly reclaimed the theoretically neutral turf about 70 miles from its stately campus in Athens. From start to finish, the No. 3 Bulldogs threw up thickets of speed, pressure, power and guile to crush No. 11 Oregon, 49-3.
Georgia took just 12 offensive snaps to score for the first time this season. With a bit more than six minutes to play in the first quarter, Stetson Bennett softly tossed the ball to Ladd McConkey, a redshirt sophomore who darted left and thundered toward the end zone close to his university’s Redcoat Marching Band, which responded with brassy thunder of its own.
The Bulldogs waited until the second quarter’s opening moments to score again, this time with a quick rush by Bennett to cap a 92-yard touchdown drive. For its third touchdown, Georgia again returned to the ground, entrusting the senior tailback Kenny McIntosh with an end zone-bound run to push his team’s tally to 21.
But it was not all Georgia’s wizardry, for the Bulldogs had help from Bo Nix, the Oregon quarterback who transferred to the Pacific Northwest from Auburn. Nix threw two interceptions in the first half, and both led to touchdown drives for Georgia, which started with one from its own 8-yard line after Malaki Starks snagged a Nix pass.
Starks also had eight tackles, the most of any Bulldog on Saturday.
Oregon’s best chance to stem Georgia’s momentum came with about four minutes remaining in the first half, when the Ducks maneuvered into the red zone. But a pair of incomplete passes and a false-start penalty left Oregon to settle for a field goal.
In the half’s closing minute, Bennett — so derided after the December loss to Alabama that Coach Kirby Smart faced questions over whether the quarterback would start in the College Football Playoff — escaped a tackle to lob a pass to McConkey and push Georgia to a 28-3 lead at halftime.
In Saturday’s game, Bennett logged 368 passing yards, the best showing in his career, and completed 81 percent of his throws. McIntosh led Georgia with 117 receiving yards.
Some of the Georgia stat padding came as soon as the Bulldogs opened the second half, when Bennett helped engineer a six-play drive that featured Kendall Milton jogging past the goal line.
Oregon fans stuck around anyway, the rebirth they sought nowhere in sight during Dan Lanning’s debut as the Oregon coach after four seasons at Georgia, including three as defensive coordinator. Instead, many stayed for a showing that only grew worse: Georgia scored touchdowns on its first seven possessions and did not punt until the fourth quarter.
Smart, whose team converted nine of its 10 third downs, moved to 7-0 in season openers.
“They have good guys, and you can’t afford to play poorly against a good team,” said Lanning, who insisted that all of Oregon’s goals remained within reach and said that Nix would remain the Oregon quarterback.
The Georgia-Oregon matchup was one of Saturday’s few contests that pitted one marquee program against another, or so recent history and the preseason polls suggested. But the season’s first full slate of games offered glimpses of the chaos, some of it cringe-inducing, and premature hope that so often thrills and terrorizes fans.
East Carolina missed an upset of No. 13 North Carolina State by 1 point, the same margin by which Rutgers escaped Boston College. North Carolina survived Appalachian State, 63-61. Iowa managed to get past South Dakota State while scoring all of 7 points — on a field goal and a pair of safeties. (“I’ve never been around a game like that,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz, in charge in Iowa City since 1999, said.)
In Arkansas, the 19th-ranked Razorbacks outlasted No. 23 Cincinnati, which last season became the first team from a Group of 5 conference to make the playoff.
Oregon was one of the teams left out last year, done in by a trip to Utah that also shattered the Pac-12 Conference’s playoff dreams. But Friday’s announcement that the playoff will expand, from four teams to 12, no later than 2026 could someday make much-hyped meetings like the one on Saturday in Atlanta less a jousting for a playoff spot than a selling point in the quest for a higher seeding.
But that reality is perhaps four seasons from now. This campaign is being played in a world that has never seen a two-loss team reach the playoff, one where fans are accustomed to bickering over which one-loss team(s) should make the cut.
Saturday made Georgia’s journey a measure clearer, in part because the Bulldogs are not scheduled to play another currently ranked opponent until Nov. 19. As it so happens, that is when Oregon will meet Utah, whose Saturday night defeat at Florida is sure to send the Utes tumbling from No. 7.
At those November kickoffs, with the final playoff rankings nearing, the first Saturday in September will probably still be resonating.
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