It's going to be Alabama-Georgia in the title game again!
Ohio State's offense is overrated!
Anthony Richardson for the Heisman!
Fire Scott Satterfield! Jeff Scott, Ken Niumatalolo, Karl Dorrell and Scott Frost, too!
It's easy to overreact one week into a given college football season. (It's also fun.) We wait so long for a first impression in this sport, and when we get it, we're off to the races.
Even if we know that everything we saw in Week 1 of the 2022 season is only so true, and that we have a lot of plot twists to come over the next three months, we still just got a lot of partial answers to the questions we've been asking for the past eight months. Let's talk about some of those answers ... and how confident they should make us about given teams throughout FBS.
Did Georgia and Alabama show us any potential flaws or undoings?
No. 3 Georgia 49, No. 11 Oregon 3
No. 1 Alabama 55, Utah State 0
This past offseason, when I was writing about potential obstacles for Georgia in its title defense, I had to work mainly with abstractions. Despite what the Dawgs were losing from the depth chart, it was hard to even pretend to worry about the depth chart. The defense still returned maybe its best overall player (tackle Jalen Carter), plus proven stars in linebacker Nolan Smith and cornerback Kelee Ringo. The offense returned quarterback Stetson Bennett and six other starters.
The best I could do for a Georgia concern was the proverbial title hangover. Since the beginning of time, countless teams in every sport have suffered a letdown after finally reaching the promised land.
Our first impression of the 2022 Dawgs: They're even better hungover. Yikes. They absolutely trucked 11th-ranked Oregon, scoring touchdowns on each of their first seven drives and allowing just a field goal. Defending national runner-up Alabama, meanwhile, did basically the same thing against Utah State, scoring on its first nine drives and not allowing the Aggies to top 100 total yards until the fourth quarter.
It feels pretty safe to say that what we saw in a small sample on Saturday is what we'll see for most of this season. This is Alabama and Georgia we're talking about, the two most proven recruiting powers in the country and teams that have met in the national title game twice in the past five years. Tide coach Nick Saban is likely the greatest college football coach ever, and Georgia coach Kirby Smart has replicated Saban's warship better than any other former assistant. But did we get any sense of weakness from these two?