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The sport that America embraces every Saturday in the fall is built on the pulse of possibility, on the dynasties that rise and fall, on the sheer unpredictability of when joy and good fortune will smile on the poor souls waiting for the day when their cursed histories turn around.
But the fundamental truth of college football across years and decades has not changed, and will likely never change. In the end, talent wins.
Always.
You can trick people for a little while. You can ride the wave of confidence and momentum for a couple months, as Tennessee did for the first eight weeks of this season. You can maybe even take advantage of a few good breaks and make a token appearance in the College Football Playoff, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s what keeps people coming back week after week, year after year, even when 95 percent of the sport starts the season with no realistic chance of winning a national championship.
At the end of the day, though, there are only two kinds of programs: Those built to win titles, and those whose shortcomings will eventually be exposed.
The analysis of No. 1 Georgia’s 27-13 victory Saturday over No. 3 Tennessee is no more complicated than that. While the Vols spent the last decade mired in dysfunction and mismanagement, Kirby Smart has spent his tenure stacking one elite recruiting class on top of another, replicating the DNA of the Alabama machine and turning Athens from a genteel place to a torture chamber.
Maybe Tennessee will get there one day. The Vols aren’t there yet, and Georgia showed how far they have still have to travel. Even though this finished as a two-touchdown game, Georgia delivered the kind of wipeout that true championship-level programs can muster when the stakes are this high.
“They’ve been recruiting at a really high level for a really long time,” Tennessee coach Josh Heupel said.
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That’s how you lose 15 NFL draft picks off a national title team and come back just as good if not better. That’s how you build a team that can play and win any style, in any stadium, in any weather conditions.
