Just some quick thoughts on tonight’s national championship game:
Win or lose, hell of a job by Sonny Dykes and his program on getting to the national championship game. They’ve been fortunate at times, but they have been really damn good as well, and every team (including Georgia last week with the missed field goal) requires a bit of luck to get this far.
I’m worried about both teams’ strengths.
Georgia’s defense allowed 4.1 yards per play last year — this year that number is 4.9, including 5.9 in the last three games — extrapolate that to a full season and that would rank in the 100s in terms of FBS rankings. Ohio State is really good offensively, but TCU has been more consistent all year. LSU was getting blown out before they started scoring, but still — you wonder if Georgia’s defense has some issues that will require an off-season to fix.
TCU was in the Top 3 offensively in terms of yards per play earlier in the season — but the depth of the conference slate brought that them down to 13th in the country — still great, but can they run for 263 yards against Georgia like they did Michigan? Duggan was only at 7.8 yards per attempt against Michigan — that number will need to be in the 8/9 range if they cannot keep rushing the football like that.
Kirby Smart has been in plenty of games like this — Sonny Dykes has not. Will that play a factor at some point?
Can we talk about how dumb it is that this game is on a Monday night? I know the NFL breaches into Saturdays this time of year, but it seems like a compromise could be had (since ESPN runs the NCAA anyhow) where the NFL can play their games during the day on Saturday (11:30 AM Central and 3:00 Central) and the national championship can be on a Saturday night. Hell, and if that can’t happen, do it on a Thursday or Friday — literally any other day of the week except for Monday.
The betting line stands at Georgia -13.5 — give me TCU all day on that.
Enjoy it, because there are 236 days until J.T. Daniels and the Rice Owls visit DKR.