Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart won only one game against the Crimson Tide, but now takes the mantle as the game’s greatest active coach.
Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football, where the Pac-12 power play has not gone entirely according to plan.. Now he really has to start trying to measure up to the incomparable legacy of Nick Saban, when the No. 4Saban set the Alabama bar impossibly high in an array of areas, most importantly winning six national championships between 2009–20. But not far down the list from that is his ownership of Georgia.
The 2017 CFP championship game, when Georgia could not hold a 13-point lead in the final 21 minutes of regulation. Out of answers in the second half, Saban benched Jalen Hurts and semi-desperately turned to a freshman backup quarterback named Tua Tagovailoa, who threw a second-and-26 touchdown bomb to a freshman named DeVonta Smith for a walk-off national title. It remains the single biggest thunderclap moment in CFP history.
The 2020 regular-season meeting in Tuscaloosa, when Mac Jones led a second-half strafing of Georgia, 41–24. At the time that felt like another catastrophic development for the Dogs, but in retrospect that was a juggernaut Alabama team that went on to win the national title—Saban’s last—unimpeded. The 2023 SEC championship game, perhaps Georgia’s most bitter loss to Bama since the ’17 natty. This was a winner-gets-in-the-playoff, loser-leaves-town showdown and the undefeated Dogs were solidly favored. But after a quick 7–0 lead, everything started to unravel on Georgia and favor Alabama. This was one of those Smart-vs.-Saban moments when Kirby looked like he was seeing ghosts, his team pressing while the Tide was executing.
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