LOS ANGELES — There is no feeling in this world quite like reaching the pinnacle of your profession, whether that means hoisting a 35-pound College Football Playoff championship trophy on the floor of a Los Angeles stadium or being handed an 8½-pound Oscar in a nearby Hollywood auditorium.
But no sooner has the last piece of confetti been swept from the stage than the same question always sweeps in to step on the celebration.
“Hey! You think you can do this again next year?!”
“Can we repeat? Is that what you’re asking me? Funny, I haven’t had that question at all today,” said Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett, the on-field leader of the reigning national champs, at Saturday morning’s CFP title game media day ahead of their clash with TCU on Monday (7:30 ET, ESPN).
He shook his head and laughed, looking down at his wrist as if he were checking a watch.
“No, wait, sorry. What I meant to say is that I haven’t had that question in almost three minutes.”
Then the 25-year-old Bulldogs folk hero looked up, no longer smiling.
“Hell yeah, we can. I don’t care what the stats or history or anyone else has to say about why we won’t.”
Actually, they say a lot. Because it almost never happens. Call it a repeat, going back-to-back, two titles in a row, whatever your chosen description, but backing up one championship with another is an accomplishment that specializes in scarcity, across all sports, particularly in college football. Since 1990, only three teams have managed to win consecutive national titles, including none during the current nine-year CFP era, when so many have complained that the participants have been too repetitive. Alabama was the last of those three back-to-back title teams, but that was a decade ago, in 2011 and 2012, way back during the latter stages of the BCS era.
“Well, I’m aware because I was a part of that while at Alabama, and I know how hard that is to do,” said Georgia coach Kirby Smart, who was a Crimson Tide assistant from 2007 to 2015. “I know how hard it is to do because there’s a lot of times we didn’t do it. We did it once, but while we were there, we won four and we were only able to repeat once.”
There is a reason it happens so infrequently. OK, reasons. Plural. An unforeseen obstacle course of impossible expectations and endless distractions that no one can truly understand until they have stood in those cleats.
Resolving the riddle of the repeat performance is a challenge that has confounded even the greatest coaches and athletes ever seen. Even Alabama’s Nick Saban. The owner of seven rings has managed to defend that jewelry only the one time. His quest to overcome that obstacle has led him to call on his fellow titans from other sports. It has been a frequent topic of conversation with his former boss and longtime pal Bill Belichick, who has won six Super Bowls at the helm of the New England Patriots but even with Tom Brady behind center pulled off the double dip only once.
Not surprisingly, any time Belichick has been asked about the difficulties of repeating, he has responded with his typical, yes, repetitive answers, immediately pivoting to the likes of “I am only focused on today’s practice.” But privately, he and Saban have delved into the psychology of it all. And they have studied how fellow GOATs have done it.
‘The disease of me’
“What you worry about is a quote from another coach who has won a lot of championships, Pat Riley,” Saban has said of the owner of five NBA titles with a record of three non-successful defenses and one pair of consecutive titles — after which the Los Angeles Lakers lost to the Detroit Pistons in the 1989 NBA Finals and, famously, after Riley had just filed a trademark on the term “three-peat.”
Saban gives Riley credit for another phrase: “He talks about ‘the disease of me.’ How much credit do I want relative to how much I’m willing to invest in the team being successful?”
As Alabama prepared to defend its 2020 CFP championship, Saban used that quote often. Then he bought in Alex Rodriguez, who talked to the Tide about the disappointment he experienced when his New York Yankees failed to back up their 2009 World Series title the following season, even though Rodriguez has always considered the 2010 team to be the more talented of the two.
“Alex said it wasn’t the distractions, it was the attractions,” Saban explained after the visit. “Everybody got more attention. Everybody had more people pulling at them, whether it was to speak at banquets or whatever, so it made it much more difficult to focus on the things that you needed to focus on to be the best player that you can be and to be the best teammate that you can be.”
Bennett offered his take.
“It’s everything man, all of that stuff,” Bennett confessed. “So, what you have to do as a group is look around and make sure everyone is accountable. We’re not going to keep someone from an amazing opportunity. But as a team, if you see that start to change someone, you owe it as a friend and teammate to check that.”
‘The fat belly’
In order to guard against those outside distractions, everyone interviewed who has been in that position is quick is say the key is not looking outward but inward. Instead of worrying about forces you can’t control, work on what you can. Yourself.
“That is really hard to do because human nature is to relax,” Smart warned. “When people pat you on the back, the human nature is to say, ‘I’m good. I’ve done a good job. And we won it last year. Let’s take a year off.'”
As one of Smart’s defensive anchors, Christopher Smith, added, “Let’s step outside of football to top CEOs. And what do people fear the most? It’s complacency. When you get to that highest point, and you feel like, we call it the fat belly: ‘Ah, I’m good, man. I’ve done enough. We good.’ You can’t be good. You can’t let the guy next to you be good.”
That’s a hard enough challenge in a professional locker room, with grown adults pulling large paychecks. It can feel downright impossible when you’re standing there addressing a room full of teenagers.
“For me, for my teammates, it was finding new ways to challenge yourself, to motivate, because your first motivation, what drove your entire life up to that point, was to win a championship, and that’s already done,” said Tim Tebow, who won a pair of national titles during his four years at Florida, but the Gators failed to defend either one. “Now, you have to find another goal. Another chip for your shoulder.”
“Once you win, there’s nothing else to do but to win again. Anything less than that is a complete failure,” said Jeter, winner of five World Series titles, including the only three-peat (do we owe Pat Riley money now?) seen in Major League Baseball in the past half-century. “We had the mindset that we were proving to people that we can do it again. You’ve got to have something you have to reach for, and for us, it was to win back-to-back.”
This is the part where we as sports fans and so many athletes are likely thinking, “Well, true champions don’t need such billboard-posted goals! They should want to win naturally!”
That’s easy to say. But even the greatest — heck, even “The Great One” — knows it’s not that simple.
“I’ve won it one time. Now I want to win it again and again and again,” explained Wayne Gretzky, owner of four Stanley Cup titles, earned via a pair of back-to-back titles, in 1984 and 1985 and again in 1987 and 1988. “But it’s not always about that.”
‘This is a totally different team’
Seemingly hours after stepping off the ice with the Cup in his arms, Gretzky was traded by the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings. He never won another Cup. The Oilers won again the following year, but they haven’t won it since.
In college football, every single offseason is like that, thanks to the NFL draft, graduation and now the light speed roster makeovers triggered by the transfer portal.
“I had the great fortune of having a really good team last year. Our staff and our organization did such a good job with that team, but we lost all of them,” Smart said about a roster that lost a stunning 15 players to the NFL draft, five more than any other team. “So, it was like starting over.”
UConn coach Geno Auriemma summed it up prior the current NCAA women’s basketball season, during which his Huskies are chasing their 12th national title, including a three-peat, a four-peat and five failed title defenses.
“The problem with winning one year and then winning the next is a lot of times having everybody back is not ideal,” he said. “That’s not the same guys coming back. Those guys that were content to be fourth, fifth, sixth in the pecking order. They went home during the summer and somebody told them, “Yo, you’re going to be No. 1 and No. 2 this year!’ So, everything changes.”
How they react to that is up to them. Sometimes they cave in, but often they do not, certainly not when they are fully integrated into the machines of college football’s most powerful programs. You know, Nick Saban’s famous “Process” and all that.
“The motivation job [for us this year] was probably not as hard as most repeats are,” Smart continued with a recognizable tone of hope. “And our staff changed. [Defensive coordinator Dan Lanning took the head-coaching job at Oregon.] So, you get a little hungrier staff sometimes when you get four new guys, and those guys have helped provide energy for a new group of players.”
Players like Sedrick Van Pran, who was a key member of Georgia’s offensive line one year ago but this season, as a redshirt sophomore, has been a visible lead Dawg, including securing co-captainship for a large chunk of the schedule.
“We don’t look at it as we’re defending a national championship,” he said. “That’s long gone. This is a totally different team. So, it’s all about leaving our legacy, especially for me, because I wasn’t the leader last year. I have a national championship as a supporter, but I don’t have one as one of the lead guys. So, that’s something that’s important to me.”
‘Championship game? That’s been every week, man’
Simultaneously, the best and worst aspects of spending a season as the champ are that you are no longer the team climbing the mountain but now the one everyone else is trying to shove off the peak.
“It’s the worst because every game you play is now the biggest game on your opponent’s schedule. Every single one of them.”
It sounded exhausting just coming from the mouth of the man explaining it, former Alabama safety and now SEC Network analyst Roman Harper. He never defended a title in Tuscaloosa, having played just prior to Saban’s arrival. But he did win Super Bowl XLIV with the New Orleans Saints. The following year, they were bounced from the playoffs in the wild-card round.
“There is zero chance to catch your breath. And if it takes you a minute to get going because of all those offseason distractions, as happens to most teams, now you’re playing catch-up while you are also catching their best effort and the road crowd’s best effort. It can wear you down.”
Harper also pointed out that a championship run means more games and that Georgia has played more football over the past two seasons than anyone else. Monday night will be its 30th game, coming off the drama of the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl semifinal win over Ohio State during which the Dawgs appeared visibly drained.
“But they have also been on that stage already,” Harper continued. “Nothing that happens Monday with schedule or preparation or routine, none of that will surprise them. They can focus on football. TCU is going to be experiencing all of this for the first time.”
Bennett agreed.
“Championship game? That’s been every week, man,” Bennett said. “A championship game is your opponent giving their best while you give your best in an environment that is the best you can experience.”
The quarterback leaned back in his chair, tilted his head and made very direct eye contact.
“Everyone wants to come up with all the problems that come with being the defending national champion. All I know is that it’s a great problem to have.”
Why he could win: Olson is a late replacement for Acuna as the home team’s representative at this year’s Derby. Apart from being the Braves’ first baseman, however, Olson also was born in Atlanta and grew up a Braves fan, giving him some extra motivation. The left-handed slugger led the majors in home runs in 2023 — his 54 round-trippers that season also set a franchise record — and he remains among the best in the game when it comes to exit velo and hard-hit rate.
Why he might not: The home-field advantage can also be a detriment if a player gets too hyped up in the first round. See Julio Rodriguez in Seattle in 2023, when he had a monster first round, with 41 home runs, but then tired out in the second round.
2025 home runs: 36 | Longest: 440 feet
Why he could win: It’s the season of Cal! The Mariners’ catcher is having one of the greatest slugging first halves in MLB history, as he’s been crushing mistakes all season . His easy raw power might be tailor-made for the Derby — he ranks in the 87th percentile in average exit velocity and delivers the ball, on average, at the optimal home run launch angle of 23 degrees. His calm demeanor might also be perfect for the contest as he won’t get too amped up.
Why he might not: He’s a catcher — and one who has carried a heavy workload, playing in all but one game this season. This contest is as much about stamina as anything, and whether Raleigh can carry his power through three rounds would be a concern. No catcher has ever won the Derby, with only Ivan Rodriguez back in 2005 even reaching the finals.
2025 home runs: 24 | Longest: 451 feet
Why he could win: He’s big, he’s strong, he’s young, he’s awesome, he might or might not be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. This is the perfect opportunity for Wood to show his talent on the national stage, and he wouldn’t be the first young player to star in the Derby. He ranks in the 97th percentile in average exit velocity and 99th percentile in hard-hit rate, so he can still muscle the ball out in BP even if he slightly mishits it. His long arms might be viewed as a detriment, but remember the similarly tall Aaron Judge won in 2017.
Why he might not: His natural swing isn’t a pure uppercut — he has a pretty low average launch angle of just 6.2 degrees — so we’ll see how that plays in a rapid-fire session. In real games, his power is primarily to the opposite field, but in a Home Run Derby you can get more cheapies pulling the ball down the line.
2025 home runs: 20 | Longest: 479 feet
Why he could win: Buxton’s raw power remains as impressive as nearly any hitter in the game. He crushed a 479-foot home run earlier this season and has four others of at least 425 feet. Indeed, his “no doubter” percentage — home runs that would be out of all 30 parks based on distance — is 75%, the highest in the majors among players with more than a dozen home runs. His bat speed ranks in the 89th percentile. In other words, two tools that could translate to a BP lightning show.
Why he might not: Buxton is 31 and the Home Run Derby feels a little more like a younger man’s competition. Teoscar Hernandez did win last year at age 31, but before that, the last winner older than 29 was David Ortiz in 2010, and that was under much different rules than are used now.
2025 home runs: 16 | Longest: 463 feet
Why he could win: If you drew up a short list of players everyone wants to see in the Home Run Derby, Cruz would be near the top. He has the hardest-hit ball of the 2025 season, and the hardest ever tracked by Statcast, a 432-foot missile of a home run with an exit velocity of 122.9 mph. He also crushed a 463-foot home run in Anaheim that soared way beyond the trees in center field. With his elite bat speed — 100th percentile — Cruz has the ability to awe the crowd with a potentially all-time performance.
Why he might not: Like all first-time contestants, can he stay within himself and not get too caught up in the moment? He has a long swing, which will result in some huge blasts, but might not be the most efficient for a contest like this one, where the more swings a hitter can get in before the clock expires, the better.
2025 home runs: 23 | Longest: 425 feet
Why he could win: Although Caminero was one of the most hyped prospects entering 2024, everyone kind of forgot about him heading into this season since he didn’t immediately rip apart the majors as a rookie. In his first full season, however, he has showed off his big-time raw power — giving him a chance to become just the third player to reach 40 home runs in his age-21 season. He has perhaps the quickest bat in the majors, ranking in the 100th percentile in bat speed, and his top exit velocity ranks in the top 15. That could translate to a barrage of home runs.
Why he might not: In game action, Caminero does hit the ball on the ground quite often — in fact, he’s on pace to break Jim Rice’s record for double plays grounded into in a season. If he gets out of rhythm, that could lead to a lot of low line drives during the Derby instead of fly balls that clear the fences.
2025 home runs: 19 | Longest: 440 feet
Why he could win: The Athletics slugger has been one of the top power hitters in the majors for three seasons now and is on his way to a third straight 30-homer season. Rooker has plus bat speed and raw power, but his biggest strength is an optimal average launch angle (19 degrees in 2024, 15 degrees this season) that translates to home runs in game action. That natural swing could be picture perfect for the Home Run Derby. He also wasn’t shy about saying he wanted to participate — and maybe that bodes well for his chances.
Why he might not: Rooker might not have quite the same raw power as some of the other competitors, as he has just one home run longer than 425 feet in 2025. But that’s a little nitpicky, as 11 of his home runs have still gone 400-plus feet. He competed in the college home run derby in Omaha while at Mississippi State in 2016 and finished fourth.
2025 home runs: 17 | Longest: 442 feet
Why he could win: Chisholm might not be the most obvious name to participate, given his career high of 24 home runs, but he has belted 17 already in 2025 in his first 61 games after missing some time with an injury. He ranks among the MLB leaders in a couple of home run-related categories, ranking in the 96th percentile in expected slugging percentage and 98th percentile in barrel rate. His raw power might not match that of the other participants, but he’s a dead-pull hitter who has increased his launch angle this season, which might translate well to the Derby, even if he won’t be the guy hitting the longest home runs.
Why he might not: Most of the guys who have won this have been big, powerful sluggers. Chisholm is listed at 5-foot-11, 184 pounds, and you have to go back to Miguel Tejada in 2004 to find the last player under 6 foot to win.
CHICAGO — Chicago White Sox great Paul Konerko got a present from one No. 14 to another in honor of the 20th anniversary of the 2005 World Series championship run: a jersey signed by noted Chicago fan Pope Leo XIV.
Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, presented Konerko a jersey with the new pontiff’s signature on the back during a ceremony prior to the game against the Cleveland Guardians. It had the six-time All-Star’s last name and “Pope Leo” above the No. 14.
Robert Prevost became the first pope from the U.S. in the history of the Catholic Church when he was elected on May 8. The Chicago-born missionary, who took the name Leo XIV, is a White Sox fan.
Prevost attended the 2005 World Series opener against Houston in Chicago. He watched from Section 140, Row 19, Seat 2 as the White Sox beat the Astros 5-3 on the way to a four-game sweep and their first title since 1917.
In May, the team unveiled a graphic installation near the seat paying tribute to Pope Leo and that moment. The pillar artwork features a waving Pope Leo XIV, along with a picture from the TV broadcast of the future pope sitting with good friend Ed Schmit and his grandson, Eddie.
Members of the 2005 team are in Chicago this weekend to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the championship run. The White Sox debuted uniform patches honoring late closer Bobby Jenks, who died last week in Portugal, where he was being treated for stomach cancer. On Friday, the team unveiled a statue of former ace Mark Buehrle.
SAN FRANCISCO — Shohei Ohtani continued his work back from elbow surgery as he pitched three scoreless innings to help the Los Angeles Dodgers end a seven-game skid with a 2-1 victory over the San Francisco Giants on Saturday.
Working as an opener for the fifth time this season after not pitching in all of 2024, Ohtani threw 36 pitches, 25 for strikes while serving as Los Angeles’ opener for the fifth time this season. He allowed one hit and struck out the side on 12 pitches in the first inning when his fastball was twice clocked at 99.9 mph.
The Giants’ only two runners against Ohtani came on a four-pitch walk to Jung Hoo Lee in the second inning and Mike Yastrzemski’s single in the third. He departed with a 1-0 lead after three innings.
The two-way Japanese star was also the Dodgers’ designated hitter and batted leadoff. He went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts.
Ohtani has allowed one run and five hits over nine innings this season.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.