ATLANTA — One program on top of the college football world. Another trying to recapture its former glory.
Nothing much changed Saturday for Georgia or Clemson.
The top-ranked Bulldogs of the Southeastern Conference began another season of enormous expectations with an overpowering 34-3 victory, while the No. 14 Tigers of the Atlantic Coast Conference looked like a once-dominant program now struggling to find its way on the biggest stages of the sport.
Going for its third national championship in four seasons, Georgia played the first of what it hopes will be three games this season at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The home of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons will host the SEC championship in December, as usual, and the College Football Playoff final in January, for the second time.
“You could see the sense of urgency pick up, you could see the attention to detail of guys locked in, focused on the plan and what they needed to do,” said Georgia quarterback Carson Beck, who enters the season with Heisman Trophy hype as the returning starter from last year’s 13-1 SEC runners-up.
Beck skipped out on the NFL draft this past spring, remaining in Athens for a fifth year with a national championship mission after missing out on the final four-team edition of the CFP last season, his first as Georgia’s starter.
“If we can just be consistent in that and each week have that exact same approach,” Beck said of each player doing his job, “then we’ll have the success that we need to get back here.”
For Clemson, it’s back to the drawing board. The Tigers were where Georgia is now not that long ago, a program that won a pair of national titles and made the CFP on a regular basis.
They have missed the playoff the past three seasons, though, and their 9-4 mark for 2023 brought the program’s most losses since 2011. Getting blown out over the final two quarters by the Bulldogs was hardly a sign the Tigers are headed in the right direction under coach Dabo Swinney.
“They just kicked our tails in the second half,” said Swinney, who took over at Clemson during the 2008 season. “They’re a great team. They’ve been a great team. They showed in the third and fourth quarter what it looks like.”
AP photo by John Bazemore / Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney walks with his players before the Tigers’ season opener against Georgia on Saturday at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.Beck completed 23 of 33 passes for 278 yards and two touchdowns. With Georgia’s top two running backs not playing — Trevor Etienne, a transfer from Florida, is apparently serving a suspension stemming from an offseason arrest, while Roderick Robinson was sidelined after undergoing toe surgery — freshman Nate Frazier stepped up in his college debut to rush for 83 yards and a touchdown.
All-American defensive back Malaki Starks made a spectacular interception and was part of a unit that held Clemson to just 188 yards. For good measure, Peyton Woodring booted a career-long field goal from 55 yards.
Trailing only 6-0 at halftime, Clemson wound up with its most lopsided loss since a 51-14 setback to Florida State in 2013. The only other larger defeat during the Swinney era was a 70-33 blowout by West Virginia in the 2012 Orange Bowl.
“We’ve got to battle back,” Swinney said. “It’s a long season ahead. Georgia is a great football team. I have no doubt they’ll go on to have a great year. This is one game. Whether you get your butt kicked or you lose by one point, when you lose, you lose. It’s 0-1. We’ve got to get back to work on Monday. We’ve got to flush it.”
When these teams opened the 2021 season in another neutral-site game at Charlotte, North Carolina, Georgia pulled out a 10-3 victory that launched the Bulldogs toward the first of what would be two straight national championships. On Saturday, Clemson again failed to score a touchdown and the divide between the programs appeared to have grown substantially in the past three years.
Swinney is sure to face even more criticism that he has failed to adapt to the changing landscape in college athletics, especially when it comes to the NCAA transfer portal.
Kirby Smart, the former Alabama defensive coordinator under Nick Saban and now in his ninth season as the head coach at his alma mater, seems to be more willing to go that route to fill Georgia’s roster gaps.
The Bulldogs got key contributions from a pair of receivers who played last season at other schools. Colbie Young (Miami) hauled in the first touchdown of the season on a 7-yard reception in the third quarter; London Humphreys (Vanderbilt) caught a 40-yard touchdown pass and made a huge third-down grab over the middle.
“That wide receiver room has so much depth,” Beck said. “Everyone wants to say guys left and there’s no talent there, but there’s so much talent. We have so much confidence in every single guy that goes out there.”
Said Smart: “We’re very selective in the transfer department. But we needed some wideouts because we lost a lot of wideouts.”
Nolan Hauser’s 26-yard field goal for Clemson with a little more than six minutes left in the third quarter made it 13-3, but that was the closest the Tigers got as the Bulldogs took over.
The upside for Clemson is the CFP’s expansion to 12 teams this season presents more leeway than ever for an early loss to a talented opponent. The Bulldogs, though, wanted to use the opener to get their minds in postseason mode.
“To me, it feels like a playoff game,”Smart said. “It’s a great way to try to assess where you are as a team. No longer do you have to win every game. But you do want to be playing your best at the end of the year. One of the ways to do that is to get quality wins.”