LOS ANGELES — The walk is a long one.
From its locker room to the team buses, TCU players and coaching staff members marched a miserable 80 yards inside the bowels of SoFi Stadium.
It was 100 steps of hell, an awful five-minute stroll minutes after being on the end of the worst beatdown in the history of college football national championship games —a near quarter-century span that dates to the arrival of the BCS in 1998. In fact, the margin of victory was larger than any in bowl history.
Offensive coordinator Garrett Riley made the walk. So did quarterback Max Duggan and coach Sonny Dykes. It was hard to ignore the reminders of the minutes-old shellacking at the hands of the Georgia Bulldogs: thundering U-G-A chants above them in the stands, bits of red-and-black confetti beneath their feet and the scent of celebratory cigar smoke wafting through the tunnel.
“No one really expected it to end like this,” says defensive end Dylan Horton. “It’s not something you think is going to happen—not like this.”
And yet, it did. Call it what you want. A complete trouncing. A stinging blowout. An unprecedented deconstruction of a football team on the biggest stage possible.
Georgia 65, TCU 7 was a lopsided bashing.
The top-seeded Bulldogs (15–0) authoritatively silenced the best story in college football, ending what felt like a miraculous run of destiny and clobbering poor Cinderella before the glass slipper fit.
Inside a dejected locker room, TCU players moved about quietly, packed up their bags and marched toward their bus. But not before delivering to a small handful of reporters a very clear message.
“It still doesn’t take away from what we’ve done this year,” running back Emari Demercado says. “Nobody expected us to be here.”
“This one is going to sting and hurt,” added Duggan, “but this game isn’t going to take away from what we did this year. This one hurts but this program is going in the right direction.”
For more than 25,000 purple-clad TCU fans, dreams were shattered from the very start. Georgia scored on its first six possessions, took a 38–7 lead at halftime and coasted to a 58-point victory unseen in the era of title games. The next closest was USC’s 55–19 victory over Oklahoma in the 2004 BCS championship.
To make matters worse, thousands of Horned Frogs fans in one end zone of the stadium felt the wrath of an unusual weather event in Los Angeles: Chilly rain. A storm rolled off the Pacific Ocean, turning this $5 billion venue into a cold, wet and miserable place.
While covered with a translucent roof, SoFi Stadium was built without exterior walls, a design to show off the normally sunny and dry weather here.
On Monday night, wind-blown rain flooded areas of the concourse and plummeted temperatures into the 50s. Stadium staff members worked with mops in an effort to clear rain water and dry escalators, many of them exposed to the elements.
All the while on the field, TCU’s dream team was meeting its final destiny. Wet, cold and frustrated, hundreds of Frogs fans drowned their sorrows. They gathered in lines for alcoholic beverages, some of them emerging with 16-ounce beer cans in each hand. By halftime, many had already turned their attention to fonder memories.
“Hey, remember that Alamo Bowl!” yelled one fan, a reference to TCU’s 47–41 win over Oregon in a 2015 bowl game.
A couple hours later, their players and coaches milled about in the locker room wondering how this went so wrong. Sure, Georgia was much more talented. In fact, the Bulldogs played with roughly 70 players rated four- or five-stars to TCU’s 17.
But the Frogs (13–2) had beaten more talented squads all season. They walloped Oklahoma, won at Texas and knocked off Michigan in the CFP semifinal. They had stormed back to win five games after trailing in the second half.
They were college football’s comeback kids, the great underdog story of 2022, the Cinderella that the sport needed.
And then, in stunning fashion, the Goliath of Georgia reminded David of its strength, power and speed.
The Bulldogs’ defense held Duggan and TCU to one early touchdown and nothing more.
Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated
“Obviously, they have really good players,” Duggan said. “I bet they’ve got a top-10 recruiting class every year. They develop them and have a really good coaching staff. That’s a good recipe for success.”
Talent isn’t the only explanation for this dreadful outing. Riley says Georgia made adjustments to a secondary that had struggled in its last two games against LSU and Ohio State.
“They did a good job mixing up coverages,” he says. “They did a good job of fixing some things on the back end. A lot of different coverages, a lot of variety, trying to probably confuse Max. They did a good job.”
Duggan completed just 14 passes for 152 yards, threw two interceptions and didn’t toss a touchdown. The Bulldogs held TCU to 188 yards of offense, or about 300 yards shy of its season average.
Georgia showed coverages that Horned Frogs players saw on film but then, just before the snap, changed its secondary looks, says Duggan. “They had a good scheme of baiting me on stuff.”
There was something else, too. The Frogs’ offensive line folded against Georgia’s defensive front. “We won up front,” quips UGA defensive coordinator Will Muschamp. “That’s what happened.”
So, just like that, the fairy-tale story of 2022 TCU ended. Down went David. So long, Cinderella. And there, in the tunnel, the parade of purple-clad players and coaches made their 100-step march.
“When you take one on the chin, it’s always tough,” Riley says as he approaches the buses for the trip back to Fort Worth. “Remarkable season. So much to be proud of. Unprecedented. After the sting of this fades away, they’re all going to realize that.”
