The 2023 edition of Dtru's Dimes, Volume IV, will begin with a brief history lesson. Let's take a walk down memory lane to the 1998 CFB season, the first season in which the CFB national champion was decided by a College Football national championship game. The participants (Tennessee and Florida State) were selected by the newly created Bowl Championship System. The BCS used multiple selection criteria, including computer rankings and votes from college football writers/coaches, to select the two best teams to play in the championship game.
Prior to the BCS, the CFB national champion was determined by vote. This was a strange system by which multiple media organizations including the AP, FWAA, NFF, USA/CNN, and active coaches via the United Press International Coaches Poll, determined their own champion. What could possibly go wrong under such a system? For starters, multiple national champions were crowned on 14 different occasions from 1954-1997!! Even worse, in both the 1964 and 1970 seasons, the voting organizations chose not one, not two, but three national champions!! I call that anti-American, but what do I know. The next time an Alabama fan tells you the total number of national championships won by the Crimson Tide, make sure they remember to put an asterisk next to the 1964 national championship that was shared with Arkansas and Notre Dame. But, I digress.
Fast forward 25 years, and THE University of Georgia's 65-7 defeat of TCU was by far the largest margin of victory in the relatively short history of national championship games. The next closest was 36 points, in USC's 55-19 defeat of Oklahoma in 2004.
I want you all to bear with me for a minute as I evaluate how lucky we are. The Homo Sapien species is estimated to have lived on earth for approximately 200,000 years. And you, dear reader, were able to exist during the reign of Kirby Smart when our Georgia Bulldogs won two consecutive CFB national championships. The chances of you being alive as a human in this period of time is .0000000000379% (work shown below for the haters). The chance of winning the Mega Millions lottery is around 1 in 300 million, or .000000333%. Translation: you're all luckier than lottery winners, at least in my book.
Final thoughts
In his final 2023 pre-season rankings, our guy Bill Connelly's SP+ has the Dawgs 1st overall (6th offensive and 2nd defensive). Worth noting that Mr. Connelly reminds us his preseason rankings are heavily influenced by, "Returning Production, Recent Recruiting, and Recent History". The top 4 teams are not separated by much, and these rankings will shift around a lot once actual games take place. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not going to opine on the 2023 Dawgs or any other team until I actually see them play. Crazy, I know. Either way, our Dawgs open the season against UT Martin this Saturday in Athens. The UT Martin Skyhawks are coming off a co-conference championship in the Ohio Valley Conference of the the Football Championship Subdivision, which has a separate SP+ ranking.
Immediately after the conclusion of last season, literally in his postgame interview, Coach Kirby Smart began preaching a message of anti-complacency/entitlement that continued all offseason. There is a reason that the last team to win 3 consecutive national championships was Minnesota in the 1930's. It's extremely difficult to maintain the level of excellence required to win one national championship, and three in a row is borderline impossible. The Dawgs have lost generational talent to the NFL draft at QB, DL, ILB, OL (actually at every position group) over the past few years, and it's no secret that the 2023 team is pretty banged up coming out of fall camp. Not to mention the loss of heralded OC Todd Monken.
I'll let my fellow 247 Sports message board warriors verbally assault each other about the state of crisis in the UGA program after Mike Bobo calls one too many run-run-pass sequences, or following a multi-interception outing from Carson Beck. I will choose to sit back and give CKS the benefit of the doubt, because he has earned that. It may be cliched, but Kirby is legitimately built different and he wants to win just as much as any diehard fan. A true maniac, and I wouldn't have anyone else in the world run my favorite sports team. Long may he reign!
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