SoFi Stadium opened up for the 2020 football season, hosted Super Bowl LVI last February, and is set to host the college football National Championship on Monday night. We are concluding the 9th College Football Playoffs and the penultimate edition before the sport adopts an expanded 12-team field with the 2024 season.
The history of the playoffs have been marred by plenty of uncompetitive games but the sport is coming off a couple of semifinal bangers where TCU upset Michigan and Georgia held off Ohio State in a pair of games that combined for 179 points.
However, for the first time in the championship game of the playoffs era we have a double-digit spread as Georgia is favored and hoping to make it 5 straight seasons with a title game winner by at least 10 points.
TCU (+12.5) vs. Georgia
AT&T College Football Playoff National Championship
SoFi Stadium
Inglewood, California
Date: Monday, January 19, 2023
Time: 7:30 PM ET
TV: ESPN
The game will be broadcast on ESPN with College GameDay beginning coverage on site in Los Angeles at 5:00 PM ET. Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit will call the game on ESPN while Field Pass with the Pat McAfee Show will be covering the game on ESPN2.
The Underfrogs
Notre Dame (2012) and Auburn (2013) are the last teams to start the season unranked and make it to the title game. Neither of those teams won the championship, as we know all too well, so this is unprecedented territory in many respects for TCU.
The Horned Frogs were way, way off the radar heading into 2022, as well. Not only were they unranked by the AP they didn’t even pick up any pre-season votes. They had gone 5-7 in 2021 battling through a season where legendary coach Gary Patterson resigned in mid-October. They brought in Sonny Dykes from across town in a solid and commendable hire after going 25-10 in his last 3 seasons at SMU.
Former Oklahoma Sooner and redshirt freshman Chandler Morris won the quarterback job in August (he played in 4 games in 2021 for the Frogs) then sprained his MCL in the 3rd quarter of the opener against Colorado. Senior Max Duggan took the job back and would go on to nearly win the Heisman while finishing 611 votes short of USC signal caller Caleb Williams.
Now, TCU is the first team from the Big 12 to make the College Football Playoff Championship.
The Chance to Repeat
Underachieving Georgia doesn’t seem that long ago to me. In the 15-year reign of Mark Richt the Dawgs finished with 10+ wins on 9 separate occasions but didn’t win the SEC over his last 10 seasons and only 2 finishes inside the top 10 over his final 8 years.
Now completing his 7th season in Athens, Kirby Smart has won 81% of his games and is looking to lead the first repeat championship in the College Football Playoff era and just the 3rd non-shared repeat winner since the 5th year of the Eisenhower Administration joining Alabama (2011-12) and Nebraska (1994-95).
Georgia is going to be a problem for a while.
Georgia is showing no signs of slowing down, either. Despite being an elite defensive coordinator stretching back to 2008, Smart just turned 47 years old a couple days before Christmas. They are also a major juggernaut in recruiting where, starting with the recently signed 2023 class, the Dawgs have the no. 2, 3, 3, 1, 2, 1, and 3 classes stretching back to 2017.
They s’posed to be are SEC
This may be about Georgia’s dominance but it’s also a continuation of the SEC’s stranglehold on the sport.
Not only would a Georgia win be a repeat but it would be 4 straight victories for the SEC league and titles in 6 out of the first 9 College Football Playoffs. Even as short ago as when the SEC Network was founded in 2014, people were seriously arguing the supremacy from the league was just a ESPN-driven narrative–all while claiming the other conferences suck too, mind you! We don’t hear too many of these arguments in 2023 anymore.
Here are the 5 most important topics entering Monday night’s showdown:
Over/Under: 63.5
Six out of the first 8 CFP title games have gone over on the points. This is a really large amount of points, though. It’s tempting to go with the under but these games continue to just shower points down all the time.
Better Uniforms: Georgia
As someone firmly on Team Purple even I can’t give this one to TCU. I know Georgia will be in their traditional red jerseys and gray pants. It would be cool if TCU went with purple and we got a color-on-color matchup but I’m assuming they’ll wear white jerseys.
Better Mascot: TCU
Bulldogs are wrinkly hot messes cruelly bred with a mountain of health problems. As such, Uga X can’t make the trip to Los Angeles and is effectively disqualified from this award. Hypnotoad prevails!
Explosiveness
TCU has made some huge offensive plays this year for big yardage while Georgia is strong in this area but not quite in the same realm once we start looking at plays over 20 yards. The Dawgs defense has been pretty mortal this season giving up big plays (average nationally, roughly) but TCU’s defense has been incredibly susceptible in this department.
Enough Left in the Tank
Max Duggan has a chance to write one of the greatest fairytales in this sport. However, my dude looked on 0% battery at the conclusion of the Big 12 Championship and played okay against Michigan while perhaps missing some of the spark that’s made him special this season.
Stetson Bennett, all 139 pounds and 25 years old of him, could end his Georgia career going 29-3.
TCU starting running back Keandre Miller is questionable after spraining his MCL in the semifinals. So far, they’re saying he will suit up and give it a go but I highly doubt he’ll be effective if he actually sees the field. That will make it even tougher for the Frogs to upset the SEC powerhouse, or maybe it’ll be part of the fairytale ending.
Wow, great stat, thanks for sharing it.
I’m surprised you even give TCU 27 points and coming close to covering. I get the feeling this one could get ugly. Thinking like 38-17 or something like that.
You vastly underestimated the extent of ugly.
Yeah, no kidding. But on the bright side at least the 2012 ND team is off the hook for embarrassing recent title game outcomes.
Welp, at least it makes the 2012 Alabama game not the most embarrassing National Championship game anymore. Sorry TCU
Eric,
Once again, thanks for taking the trouble — this analysis alone makes me think I might just get up at 0200 to watch some of this — does TCU have real frogs or a guy dressed up like a frog? And do we owe them a bit of affection for taking out the Skunkbears?
TCU offers a masterclass in dressing people up like “frogs”
Ooof, ummm… kinda like a low budget Star Wars spinoff…
Looks like the cousin of Clemson’s meth Tiger mascot that got dropped in some radioactive waste.
🙂
I’m pretty sure that first one is Gollum from the original Hobbit cartoon.
And I guess that means there’s no chance they’ll survive this match-up with the ring? Or that they’ll steal the Dawgs’ rings only to meet an untimely fate?
Maybe this analogy only goes so far.
OSU constantly confuses me. They looked like the clear number 2 last week but yet again laid an egg against UM.
I suspect teams with elite skill players benefit from the extra bowl practice.
tOSU always manages to lay one egg a year. I give you OSU/Purdue 2018, the Rondale Moore game. Check this TD where he ran through about 7 Buckeyes to clinch a Purdue blowout.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=298355944102871
Yeah, they have so much talent they are legitimately a super-high ceiling team, but probably have coaching and/or mental blocks that pop up too much to be consistently as good as they actually are every single game.
tOSU should be the #2 team best in the country, but they’d probably lose to Michigan again this week if they lined up and played them.
It’ll be very interesting to see Hartman against tOSU next year. Depends on how their QB reload goes, but it took them a long time to put an ND team away that only had 250 yards of offense (50 on the first play!) and 12 first downs.
Have to say one of the most annoying nd adjacent storylines to pop up from tcu was “how did nd ever miss on max duggan”….well considering he wasn’t even starting for tcu at the start of his 5th year kind of easy to see how people missed on him half a decade ago
It was a nice season, TCU.
We’ll always remember when you beat Michigan.
Even though I was rooting for TCU, it was kind of awesome to watch arguably the most impressive performance of all time.
To your point, my favorite moment in the game was the TD pass to Ladd McConkey at the end of the first. The announcers called it a busted coverage, but in reality, the defender is trying to cover both a wide open receiver and a wide open running back at the same time. Also the TE was open for good measure.
I was thinking of getting up at 0130 to watch this game, but Eric’s great analysis convinced me that it would be a blowout. Guess I’m glad.
Guess I’m glad I slept through it, I meant to say. Must have been painful for Fowler and his sidekick. That said — a beat down of this proportion says something perhaps more profound than we might think about our sport. And it would be interesting to see what you all think along those lines.
Very unrelated, but it’s time for some self-flagellation!
I find myself annoyingly sad looking at this list of top performers from the All-American Bowl and seeing names that were either committed to ND, almost committed, or who had ND in their top group: https://www.on3.com/news/all-american-bowl-2023-overall-top-performers/