INGLEWOOD, Calif. — For so long, Georgia was the flagship program of the really good but not quite great. It produced a few decades of pretty nice seasons ending in pretty nice bowl games played by a lot of really good players dressed in red, white and black. But the Dawgs were always a few steps behind the sport’s elite.
They were always one play shy of beating Alabama. Always a few five-star recruits behind Florida. Always a few inches short when measured against the true ruling class of college football, even as the head of that class rolled through different eras and teams, from Miami and Nebraska to Southern California and seemingly every team in the SEC except for the one in Athens, Georgia.
But on a damp Monday night outside Los Angeles, the Georgia Bulldogs didn’t simply engrave their names onto the measuring stick by which all other college football programs are measured, they pulled that stick off the desk and beat the TCU Horned Frogs with it. Now, the conversation about Georgia football isn’t about what it hasn’t been able to do. It’s about what it might be able to do that few have ever done before: move past building championship seasons and move into building a championship era.
“I don’t know about that word, era; I’m not even sure what an era is,” Kirby Smart confessed as he headed from the confetti-covered SoFi Stadium field to the cigar-smoke-filled locker room after winning the College Football Playoff National Championship. “But I know what a great program looks like, a program that is built to last. I was part of four national championships as an assistant coach at Alabama. I know how hard it is to get to the peak of the sport, and I know it is even harder to stay there. I know what the foundation of that looks like. I think we are building that foundation. I hope we are.”
Consider it built. Concrete poured, cured and seemingly built to last.
UGA won its second national title in a row, only the fourth team to do so since 1990 and the first in the nine-year College Football Playoff era. It did it via a beatdown the likes of which hasn’t been seen in a national title game of any format in 152 years of college football. Not the 1971 Orange Bowl (Nebraska 38, Alabama 6). Not the 1972 Rose Bowl (USC 42, Ohio State 17). Oklahoma 1985 (25-10 over Penn State). Nebraska 1995 (62-24 over Florida). USC in 2004 (55-19 over Oklahoma). Florida in 2006 (41-14 over Ohio State). Not even the previous standard-bearer for title game dominance: Alabama over Notre Dame 42-14 in the 2013 BCS championship. Miami in 2001, LSU in 2019, whatever comes up while thumbing through the record books … not a single one of those juggernaut teams or lopsided evenings on the gridiron comes close to approaching the 65-7 Bulldogs bulldozing that took place Monday night at SoFi Stadium.
It demoralized the upstart Horned Frogs and sent shivers into the souls of any team hoping to stand in TCU’s cleats anytime soon. It was the most lopsided postseason victory since bowl games made their debut in Pasadena, California, in 1902, capping a 17-game winning streak, the longest for Georgia since 1947. The Bulldogs’ 29 wins ties the mark for any major college team over a two-season span and is the most ever for an SEC school. Monday’s victory rewrote page after page of the college football history book.
“Georgia, obviously you’ve seen them in the past couple of seasons now, really, they’ve taken hold of college football.” That declaration was made by former Georgia All-America linebacker turned TV analyst David Pollack during ESPN’s halftime coverage of the game, when the score was 38-7.
He said it while sitting beside the network’s guest analyst for the evening, Alabama coach Nick Saban.
If it’s possible to say it, the game was even worse than the score. It was such a throttling that Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett, shortly after tying LSU signal-caller Joe Burrow‘s CFP title game record for points responsible for (36), was pulled from the game … with 13:25 remaining in the fourth quarter.
This is a team that lost 15 — yes, 15! — players to the 2022 NFL draft, five more than any other team, and simply reloaded. A defense that was supposed to take a step backward after a 2021 unit that was statistically speaking among the greatest of all time instead limited TCU — which came into the game averaging 474 yards and 41 points per game — to 188 yards and one solitary touchdown. A team that looked emotionally and physically exhausted after a New Year’s Eve thriller comeback win over Ohio State in the CFP semifinals responded by embarking on a week of practice that Bennett described in the days leading up to the title game as “a damn reconstruction project.”
“You attack every aspect of this as a challenge,” Bennett, 25, recalled of the week, quick to praise the UGA scout team that played the role of tough-as-railroad-spikes TCU quarterback Max Duggan. “Now I am done, but I think that those who are still here, and maybe those of us who are gone, have a responsibility to make sure this keeps rolling. Make sure you feel the pressure of keeping up what has been built.”
The comment showed shades of those all-time teams that Georgia once chased. The legendary Miami Hurricanes calling out from NFL locker rooms to those youngsters wearing their beloved orange and green to ask what happened after a loss to a rival or one that ended a streak. Or Saban’s Alabama veterans showing up to spring practice to talk to their heirs about maintaining the principles of the process.
“That’s what we all have to guard against, complacency, and I am talking about coaches, players, even fans, never taking a night like this one for granted,” said Smart, who played defensive back on a lot of those good but never great Bulldogs teams of the 1990s. “You have to expect to be in these games and expect to win these games, but you can’t assume that it will happen. And I think that’s why trying to win a third straight championship will be an even steeper challenge than this one was. We lost so many guys last year and have so many more guys coming back next year. That’s more chances for complacency.”
It’s also more chances to benefit from experience, to lean on been there, done that. More than half of this season’s starters were redshirt sophomores or younger. They’ll be paired with what will be Georgia’s seventh consecutive top-three recruiting class.
Smart is only 47 years old. His former mentor, the guy who was sitting awkwardly next to Pollack, is 71. The GOAT was fully focused on what was in front of him. Saban always is.
“I have hard time watching football because it’s always work,” Saban confessed the morning of the game. “How would we scheme against this? How are they accomplishing that? And in the case of what Kirby has done at Georgia, that is especially true. That’s the greatest compliment I can give any program, that everyone in our business has to watch everything you do.”
Yes, there are plenty of cautionary tales when it comes to college football dominion collapses. The transfer portal; name, image and likeness (NIL); an expanded playoff — the list of what has derailed the mighty and could do the same to the Dawgs in the future is ever changing. All of those teams listed earlier, from Miami to Nebraska to USC, have fallen from “they can’t be beaten!” to “whatever happened to those guys?” It was just four winters ago when Clemson was playing in its fourth CFP title game in five years, and it has since slowly started sliding from the national conversation.
But even the players and coaches from those ruling-class programs, hailing from every spot along the timeline of college football history, likely spent their Monday night like the rest of us, watching the Georgia Bulldogs and wondering if what we witnessed against TCU might be a lot closer to the beginning of something big than it is to any conceivable end.
“I want to enjoy tonight, and I will,” said Georgia’s Brock Bowers, the All-America tight end who hauled in seven catches for 152 yards and a TD. He also is one of those sophomores. “But we go back to work as soon as we get home. There is always work to be done.”
That’s how it goes when you’re building an empire.
ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
NEW YORK — Giancarlo Stanton, one of the first known adopters of the torpedo bat, declined Tuesday to say whether he believes using it last season caused the tendon ailments in both elbows that forced him to begin this season on the injured list.
Last month, Stanton alluded to “bat adjustments” he made last season as a possible reason for the epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, he’s dealing with.
“You’re not going to get the story you’re looking for,” Stanton said. “So, if that’s what you guys want, that ain’t going to happen.”
Stanton said he will continue using the torpedo bat when he returns from injury. The 35-year-old New York Yankees slugger, who has undergone multiple rounds of platelet-rich plasma injections to treat his elbows, shared during spring training that season-ending surgery on both elbows was a possibility. But he has progressed enough to recently begin hitting off a Trajekt — a pitching robot that simulates any pitcher’s windup, arm angle and arsenal. However, he still wouldn’t define his return as “close.”
He said he will first have to go on a minor league rehab assignment at an unknown date for an unknown period. It won’t start in the next week, he added.
“This is very unique,” Stanton said. “I definitely haven’t missed a full spring before. So, it just depends on my timing, really, how fast I get to feel comfortable in the box versus live pitching.”
While the craze of the torpedo bat (also known as the bowling pin bat) has swept the baseball world since it was revealed Saturday — while the Yankees were blasting nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers — that a few members of the Yankees were using one, the modified bat already had quietly spread throughout the majors in 2024. Both Stanton and former Yankees catcher Jose Trevino, now with the Cincinnati Reds, were among players who used the bats last season after being introduced to the concept by Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT-educated physicist and former minor league hitting coordinator for the organization.
Stanton explained he has changed bats before. He said he has usually adjusted the length. Sometimes, he opts for lighter bats at the end of the long season. In the past, when knuckleballers were more common in the majors, he’d opt for heavier lumber.
Last year, he said he simply chose his usual bat but with a different barrel after experimenting with a few models.
“I mean, it makes a lot of sense,” Stanton said. “But it’s, like, why hasn’t anyone thought of it in 100-plus years? So, it’s explained simply and then you try it and as long as it’s comfortable in your hands [it works]. We’re creatures of habit, so the bat’s got to feel kind of like a glove or an extension of your arm.”
Stanton went on to lead the majors with an average bat velocity of 81.2 mph — nearly 3 mph ahead of the competition. He had a rebound, but not spectacular, regular season in which he batted .233 with 27 home runs and a .773 OPS before clubbing seven home runs in 14 playoff games.
“It’s not like [it was] unreal all of a sudden for me,” Stanton said.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone described the torpedo bats “as the evolution of equipment” comparable to getting fitted for new golf clubs. He said the organization is not pushing players to use them and insisted the science is more complicated than just picking a bat with a different barrel.
“There’s a lot more to it than, ‘I’ll take the torpedo bat on the shelf over there — 34 [inches], 32 [ounces],'” Boone said. “Our guys are way more invested in it than that. And really personalized, really work with our players in creating this stuff. But it’s equipment evolving.”
As players around the majors order torpedo bats in droves after the Yankees’ barrage over the weekend — they clubbed a record-tying 13 homers in two games against the Brewers — Boone alluded to the notion that, though everyone is aware of the concept, not every organization can optimize its usage.
“You’re trying to just, where you can on the margins, move the needle a little bit,” Boone said. “And that’s really all you’re going to do. I don’t think this is some revelation to where we’re going to be; it’s not related to the weekend that we had, for example. Like, I don’t think it’s that. Maybe in some cases, for some players, it may help them incrementally. That’s how I view it.”
Eovaldi struck out eight and walked none in his fifth career complete game. The right-hander threw 99 pitches, 70 for strikes.
It was Eovaldi’s first shutout since April 29, 2023, against the Yankees and just the third of his career. He became the first Ranger with multiple career shutouts with no walks in the past 30 seasons, according to ESPN Research.
“I feel like, by the fifth or sixth inning, that my pitch count was down, and I feel like we had a really good game plan going into it,” Eovaldi said in his on-field postgame interview on Victory+. “I thought [Texas catcher Kyle Higashioka] called a great game. We were on the same page throughout the entire game.”
In the first inning, Wyatt Langford homered for Texas against Carson Spiers (0-1), and that proved to be all Eovaldi needed. A day after Cincinnati collected 14 hits in a 14-3 victory in the series opener, Eovaldi (1-0) silenced the lineup.
“We needed it, these bats are still quiet,” Texas manager Bruce Bochy said of his starter’s outing. “It took a well-pitched game like that. What a game.”
The Reds put the tying run on second with two out in the ninth, but Eovaldi retired Elly De La Cruz on a grounder to first.
“He’s as good as I have seen as far as a pitcher performing under pressure,” Bochy said. “He is so good. He’s a pro out there. He wants to be out there.”
Eovaldi retired his first 12 batters, including five straight strikeouts during one stretch. Gavin Lux hit a leadoff single in the fifth for Cincinnati’s first baserunner.
“I think it was the first-pitch strikes,” Eovaldi said, when asked what made him so efficient. “But also, the off-speed pitches. I was able to get some quick outs, and I didn’t really have many deep counts. … And not walking guys helps.”
Spiers gave up three hits in six innings in his season debut. He struck out five and walked two for the Reds, who fell to 2-3.
The Rangers moved to 4-2, and Langford has been at the center of it all. He now has two home runs in six games to begin the season. In 2024, it took him until the 29th game of the season to homer for the first time. Langford hit 16 homers in 134 games last season during his rookie year.
Eli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.
USC secured the commitment of former Oregon defensive tackle pledge Tomuhini Topui on Tuesday, a source told ESPN, handing the Trojans their latest recruiting victory in the 2026 cycle over the Big Ten rival Ducks.
Topui, ESPN’s No. 3 defensive tackle and No. 72 overall recruit in the 2026 class, spent five and half months committed to Oregon before pulling his pledge from the program on March 27. Topui attended USC’s initial spring camp practice that afternoon, and seven days later the 6-foot-4, 295-pound defender gave the Trojans his pledge to become the sixth ESPN 300 defender in the program’s 2026 class.
Topui’s commitment gives USC its 10th ESPN 300 pledge this cycle — more than any other program nationally — and pulls a fourth top-100 recruit into the impressive defensive class the Trojans are building this spring. Alongside Topui, USC’s defensive class includes in-state cornerbacks R.J. Sermons (No. 26 in ESPN Junior 300) and Brandon Lockhart (No. 77); four-star outside linebacker Xavier Griffin (No. 27) out of Gainesville, Georgia; and two more defensive line pledges between Jaimeon Winfield (No. 143) and Simote Katoanga (No. 174).
The Trojans are working to reestablish their local recruiting presence in the 2026 class under newly hired general manager Chad Bowden. Topui not only gives the Trojans their 11th in-state commit in the cycle, but his pledge represents a potentially important step toward revamping the program’s pipeline to perennial local powerhouse Mater Dei High School, too.
Topui will enter his senior season this fall at Mater Dei, the program that has produced a long line of USC stars including Matt Leinart, Matt Barkley and Amon-Ra St. Brown. However, if Topui ultimately signs with the program later this year, he’ll mark the Trojans’ first Mater Dei signee since the 2022 cycle, when USC pulled three top-300 prospects — Domani Jackson, Raleek Brown and C.J. Williams — from the high school program based in Santa Ana, California.
Topui’s flip to the Trojans also adds another layer to a recruiting rivalry rekindling between USC and Oregon in the 2026 cycle.
Tuesday’s commitment comes less than two months after coach Lincoln Riley and the Trojans flipped four-star Oregon quarterback pledge Jonas Williams, ESPN’s No. 2 dual-threat quarterback in 2026. USC is expected to continue targeting several Ducks commits this spring, including four-star offensive tackle Kodi Greene, another top prospect out of Mater Dei.