INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Stetson Bennett was all set to sign with Louisiana-Lafayette, a high quality program out of the mid-major Sun Belt Conference. He had given the highest level of faculty football a shot, attending Georgia as a walk-on out of highschool.
After one season there of inaction, he left for junior college, where he put up strong numbers at Jones County in Mississippi, and verbally committed to Louisiana-Lafayette in December 2018.
“I woke up on signing day and planned on signing there,” he said over the summer, “After which Georgia called.”
Kirby Smart was offering him a scholarship. Bennett couldn’t say no, despite the plain hurdles ahead of him to get on the sphere — the five-star recruits and gifted athletes who could be ahead of him. He would get recruited over, whilst a backup. But Bennett was convinced he could outwork the more talented competition.
Nevertheless, even the 5-foot-11 quarterback couldn’t have believed it could work out this fashion, to not this extent. No person could’ve. The percentages were stacked against him. Just rising up the depth chart to at some point start at Georgia was an accomplishment. These last two years is the stuff of legend, a Hollywood script that, paradoxically, took him to Los Angeles on Monday night for the national championship game, as he joined an exclusive club of starting quarterbacks who won consecutive titles with a 65-7 bludgeoning of TCU at SoFi Stadium. Bennett became the sixth quarterback to accomplish that, and the primary since Alabama’s A.J. McCarron in 2011-12, after his six-touchdown, 304-yard masterpiece accomplished the Bulldogs’ perfect season.
“He’s got G.O.A.T. status ceaselessly in Athens, GA.,” Smart said.
It was a storybook ending to a unicorn of a school profession that even dwarfed the Cinderella story of his opponent, TCU, which had 200/1 odds to win all of it back in August, by way of its unlikelihood.
A former walk-on who was evenly recruited and undersized, who became the quarterback to steer Georgia to its first national championship in 41 years last January, after which followed that up with a fair higher season. Bennett won 25 of his last 26 starts, 28 of 31 overall and in 4 playoff games over two postseasons, produced 15 total touchdowns, only one interception and accomplished 67.8 percent of his passes. This yr, he beat C.J. Stroud, Will Levis, Hendon Hooker and Anthony Richardson — 4 of the highest five draft-eligible quarterback prospects for April’s NFL draft in line with ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. — and Monday night the 25-year-old signal-caller became the all-time single-season passing leader in Georgia history with 4,127 yards.
Consider all of the quarterbacks in Athens, Ga. before him who couldn’t end the drought, from Matthew Stafford to Justin Fields, Jake Fromm to Jacob Eason, Aaron Murray to Quincy Carter, Eric Zeier to David Greene. Last season, he began the yr No. 2 on the depth chart, behind prized USC transfer J.T. Daniels. When Daniels suffered an oblique injury, Bennett got his probability. He never looked back, Wally Pipp’ing Daniels.
“He overcame us,” Smart said.
There have been similar stories of walk-ons bucking the percentages to stardom. Probably the most recent was Hunter Renfrow, the Raiders’ wide receiver who caught the game-winning touchdown for Clemson within the 2016 national championship game. Adam Archuleta, an NFL analyst with CBS, became a first-round select of Arizona State in 2001 after starting as a walk-on and played seven years within the NFL. Arizona State was Archuleta’s only option on the Division I level, and it wanted him to play linebacker, although he only weighed 185 kilos on the time.
“To me, it was OK, my foot’s within the door,” he recalled.
Bennett’s story is different. There is simply one quarterback — it’s a very powerful position on the sphere. He had to beat a lot to be the guy for Georgia. He needed an incredible amount of belief in himself, an innate ability to handle adversity and never let it negatively impact him. And to find a way to handle prosperity after working so hard only for a possibility.
“I don’t know all the fellows who walked on and went on to have success, but I might must rank him up there near the highest or at the highest,” Archuleta said.
It’s ironic that Georgia couldn’t recover from the hump until it finally gave the job to Bennett, who’s often called “The Mailman,” because he once wore a U.S. Postal Service hat to a showcase camp while in highschool. Bennett enjoyed growing out his hair and wearing glasses to those showcases, after which winning them, shocking onlookers.
“It was my thing,” he said.
At Georgia, the quarterback position was the one issue dogging Smart for all of the success he had in his first six years at his alma mater. He couldn’t answer the quarterback conundrum, until he finally — and reluctantly — gave the ball to Bennett.
On a team of five-star recruits and future NFL players, Stetson Bennett pushed Georgia to recent heights, making it the brand new Alabama because the preeminent power in the game. Early within the fourth quarter Monday, Smart called timeout and took out Bennett, allowing him to walk off the sphere to the standing ovation he deserved. One teammate after one other embraced him — the a part of the movie when the sappy music would hit.
After Monday night, Bennett should stay in Los Angeles for a number of days and pitch his story to screenwriters. College football has never witnessed a journey quite like his.