All is well between the white lines for Georgia football

The Clemson-Georgia game was advertised as a matchup of college football heavyweights.

Only one heavyweight actually showed up as Georgia humiliated the Tigers 34-3.

The game was not without some level of angst for the Georgia faithful, as they endured a lackluster first half devoid of touchdowns. But the final 30 minutes demonstrated that Kirby Smart’s team remains elite in the sport. With an expanded 12-team playoff awaiting at the end of the season, it does appear that Bulldog fans should begin soon with a savings plan to underwrite numerous post-season trips.

The outcome, however, demonstrates the precarious nature of college football. Even young children can remember a time when Clemson was the one looking down at Georgia, and everybody else. Dabo Swinney has a crick in his neck now, looking up at the powers that be.

After Saturday’s game, he was searching for ways to describe the beatdown, resorting to three different synonyms to describe how they got their derrieres kicked. If you must know, they rhymed with fails, huts and passes.

When Georgia was ascendant under Vince Dooley, so was Clemson under Danny Ford. The Bulldogs won the 1980 national title. Clemson took the 1981 title. And then neither program won another one. They didn’t exactly drop off the map, but they lost their pass key to the gated neighborhood labeled National Title Contender.

Swinney was out in front on the revival plan, winning national titles in 2016 and 2018. They were in the college football playoffs every year from 2015 to 2020. Clemson was the definition of college football royalty.

Not so much lately. Even if a 12-team playoff had started in 2021, they would have been on the outside looking in.

The popular theory is that Swinney has been slow to adjust to the new realities of NIL and transfers, particularly the latter. He does not recruit the transfer portal as other schools do. Half of the touchdowns Georgia scored against Clemson were by players that Smart plucked from the portal: Colbie Young from Miami and London Humphreys from Vanderbilt.

Clemson has recruited at a high level, though south of the heavenly reaches of Georgia. But it has fallen off in two areas of talent: quarterback and receivers.

Both its national titles came with generational quarterbacks (from Georgia), Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence. They had elite receivers to throw to. Georgia, by contrast, famously won its national titles with a former walk-on, Stetson Bennett. And if there is a hole in the recruiting pipeline at Georgia, it is wide receiver. For some reason, the crème de la crème of wideouts seldom choose Georgia.

Clemson’s woes seem like third-world problems to Georgia, which won its 40th straight regular-season game Saturday. Even while losing a regular stream of outstanding players to the NFL year after year, the Bulldogs seem to have plug-and-play options waiting in the wings. Their ranking as the No. 1 team in the land reflects their perceived status.

After the win over Clemson, Smart said his team out-physicaled, out-hustled and out-disciplined the Tigers. He gets no points for grammar, but he was not wrong.

But no team or program is invincible. That includes Georgia. For all its success on the field, off-the-field woes have plagued Smart. Namely, a stream of arrests, mostly for speeding, and a woeful graduation rate.

Young people drive too fast. That is no secret. Insurance actuaries will tell you that. But the problem here is exacerbated by two fatalities after the 2022 national title celebration. You would think that such an incident would dampen enthusiasm for driving fast. (See earlier statement: Young people drive fast.)

Apparently, one running back, portal-get Trevor Etienne, watched from the sidelines, suspended for his own driving indiscretions. Television announcers were convinced that Etienne was held out. But when intrepid AJC sports reporter Chips Towers asked Smart in the post-game press conference, if Etienne was indeed held out for suspension, Smart replied, “Nice try, Chip. We are not going to talk about that.”

It is a sore subject with Smart, who is certainly exasperated that reckless driving and speeding continues to be a problem. There is no reason to doubt him that safe driving is a point of emphasis. But for some reason, he chooses to keep his disciplinary policies to himself.

The problem with private punishment is that Smart looks soft on crime, so to speak. The spate of arrests, if not the severity, has rivaled outlaw programs of the past, such as Miami or Florida, and tarnished Georgia’s reputation.

Smart maintained in his post-game comments that the team dynamics are, in a word, “awesome.”

“I wish you could talk to our players and see them day to day,” he said. “Two of them are sitting right here,” he said, motioning toward quarterback Carson Beck and linebacker Jalon Walker. “Ask them, and they will tell you. What you know of inside the program is a lot more than what you see on the outside. People use that in negative recruiting, and it comes back to bite them.”

Then the graduation rate for football is embarrassing. Georgia’s graduation success rate for the most recent reporting period is 41 percent. LSU is the next lowest in the SEC at 69 percent. Not surprisingly Vanderbilt is first at 95 percent.  Second? Alabama at 93 percent. Apparently, there are some aspects of the Saban process that Smart did not learn.

Winning covers a multitude of woes. And it will continue this week with pay-for-play opponent Tennessee Tech.

It graduates three-fourths of its football players, by the way.