SOMEHOW, STET FROM BLACKSHEAR IS BECOMING THE BEST STORY IN SPORTS
Bigger than Georgia’s ascent to possible back-to-back titles is the triumph of Stetson Bennett IV, the small-town walk-on who persevered to conquer college football and make his coaches look silly
He’s been airlifted from a cobwebbed era in college football, when a walk-on could ignore slights and sneers and ride sweet audacity to the pages of a Hollywood script. Only this fairy tale is happening on a much higher plane than Rudy, with a magnitude that continues to jolt humankind, authored by a book-reading superhero as unlikely as his name: Stetson Bennett IV.
“I’m just Stet Bennett from Blackshear, right?” he says.
Not anymore. With increasing improbability, he has morphed into the best and most invigorating story in sports. Somehow, a nerdy kid from small-town Georgia wandered into the program of his childhood dreams, between the hedges in Athens, and refused to take no for an answer. He was going to play for the Bulldogs, darn it, whether coach Kirby Smart liked the idea or not. His raw defiance was only the beginning of the story, it turns out.
Look at Stetson Bennett now, amplifying his legend across the land with the commanding comeback that defines every champion quarterback. His performance in the national semifinal game hadn’t been pleasant, filled with mistakes, including one hideous interception that drew Smart’s ire. It seemed the opposing QB, heralded C.J. Stroud, would be off to the College Football Playoff title game and launch a spirited talk-radio debate on whether he or Alabama’s Bryce Young should go No. 1 in the NFL draft. Then Bennett had something to say in the Georgia huddle, with just over two and a half minutes left, down 41-35, an hour from campus in downtown Atlanta, history awaiting an affirmative answer.
“Just looking at everybody and saying, ‘All right, hey, we haven't played our best, and we haven't done our jobs to the best of our ability. But we’re here now,’ ’’ he recalled his words, just before the Bulldogs lined up 65 yards from the Ohio State end zone. “… ‘It's in our hands now. The defense stood up whenever we needed them to. Where else would you rather be? Having the ball with two minutes left, and if you score a touchdown you win the game.’ I looked around, and there was just a whole bunch of just determined, strong stares from all the dudes. It gave me confidence, and everybody else had confidence when we went down the field.”
What happened next capped arguably the most riveting day in the annals of a rocking sport. Bennett completed the largest fourth-quarter comeback in a CFP game, which began with a 76-yard scoring pass to a nakedly open Arian Smith — they can thank the slippage of safety Lathan Ransom on the Mercedes-Benz Stadium turf — and ended in pandemonium with the winning touchdown, 10 yards to Adonai Mitchell. He hit all five of his passes on the drive. The final score Saturday night, through a collective exhale after two unforgettable, dizzying games and 179 points: Georgia 42, Ohio State 41. Suddenly, at age 25 and in his sixth year on campus, Stet from Blackshear finds himself days from an achievement that has eluded every all-time QB who has played the sport: back-to-back national championships.
He’s more blown away by the thought than we are. “If you’d told me that when we were down whatever we were in the fourth, I would have been like, ‘You are crazy’, ” he said. “But we'll see you there.”
In Los Angeles, he means, where studio bosses should be frothing at the concept of making an even better “Rudy” after he’s through with another embraceable upstart, 13-point-underdog TCU, a week from Monday night in SoFi Stadium. You know the basics by now. Bennett arrived from a map-dot town of 3,500 about 40 miles north of the Florida border. He played on the scout team with fellow afterthoughts who became insurance brokers and medical device salespersons. He left for Jones County Junior College in Mississippi, returned after one year — and still was shunned in favor of five-star recruits, snubbed by coaches who couldn’t shake their original impressions: lightly recruited, undersized at 5-11, with nowhere near the pedigrees of Jake Fromm or Jacob Eason and nowhere near the multiple dimensions of Justin Fields. For much too long, an otherwise shrewd man named Smart treated him on the practice fields like a rube.
“I’d always make these throws and I'd be like ‘Man, there's no way that's not good.’ I kept hearing people tell me that I'm not good, but that looked good, and I'd look at it and be, ‘Am I dumb? I didn't think so.’ ’’ Bennett said. “If I can do it once, I can do it all the time. It's just a motion. I don't want to sound like a nerd or smarter than I am, but gravity works, physics works, and blah, blah, blah. If I can figure how to do it multiple times, I might be good.
“But I didn’t let it both me. I did realize after 2020 that I hated them, and I was like, screw you guys.”
Hate is a robust motivator. It feeds perseverance and resolve, the core elements of the Stetson Bennett story. For someone who once wore a U.S. Postal Service cap to be noticed in football camps — hence, his nickname “The Mailman” — and someone who wasn’t invited to Georgia until a high-school opponent lobbied Smart, Bennett has amassed close to 6,500 passing yards and 52 TD passes the last two seasons as an expert ball-distributor and elusive playmaker. Crazier, he’s doing so in haywire times when the transfer portal allows peripatetic passers to change programs three or four times, teens are wooed by the millions of NIL collectives, and the Supreme Court — no judge more satisfied than Brett Kavanaugh — is thrilled to view the institutional disruption it has caused. It’s why Bennett is so important to the college game.
We might never see anyone like him again, you see, at least not anytime soon. He wasn’t an NIL baby. He didn’t use the portal. He wasn’t cold-called by a Georgia great like Matthew Stafford. He just waited his turn and let it rip, all the way to a ballroom in New York, where he watched USC’s Caleb Williams — a beneficiary of a too-early vote — win a Heisman Trophy that should have been his. What’s beautiful about Bennett is that he accepts his long, arduous journey with good cheer and impressive perspective. Last January, two weeks after leading the Bulldogs to their first natty in 41 years, he sat in a math class with other students and pondered a life lesson.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, so it doesn't change. It's life. It keeps going on,’ ’’ he said. “I was so grateful to realize that then, instead of working at a job for 40 years to reach that goal, and reaching that goal when I'm 63 and being like ‘Crap.’ Yeah, you're going to have to work, and it's not about the championships or the gravy at the end of the journey. It's about the journey. That's why you have to pick something you love, because then you can get through the day-to-day and work hard and chase excellence and be proud of it.
“That’s why it’s so cool. How can you have stories if you end up exactly where you wanted to go, following the exact plan you planned out? I had the guts to go chase it, and then chase it more once I realized that I’m not there yet. That’s life, man. And it’s a lot more interesting that way.”
Once Bennett’s biggest detractor and obstacle, Smart has become his most fervent cheerleader. It wasn’t long ago, at the start of the 2021 season, that Georgia was convinced its quarterbacking savior was a USC transfer named JT Daniels. He was the one who received a six-figure NIL deal from Zaxby’s, a chicken chain based in the South. Not until he was injured did Bennett win the full-time job. Since then, Daniels has used the portal twice more — to West Virginia and Rice — while Bennett finally has cashed in with NIL deals exceeding $1 million. No wonder Smart was sheepish when asked about Bennett last week.
“It’s just incredible what all he overcame. Well, he overcame us,” Smart said. “You know, we didn't put the guy out there. And he came and met with me and wanted more reps, and we tried to get him more reps, and he took reps with the (third-stringers). Every spring game he went with the threes he had success, and it's like what more can the guy do? We, as coaches, did everything we could to not give him the opportunity. He just kept banging away at the door and was very persistent. I don’t know anybody could have written a script with what he’s done in terms of start to finish with trials, tribulations, ups and downs, highs and lows. To have that be near the end of it is pretty special.”
Said offensive coordinator Todd Monken: “At times, you’re looking in other directions for players and you're not smart enough to see what’s right under your nose. At the end of the day, we’re not perfect. We don’t always see it the right way. But the key is do you change course and make it right on who should be playing? All we did was try to bury him, and all he did was continue to fight and compete and (he) had every reason to say, you know what, I’m gone in today’s day and age in the portal and guys leaving He didn’t do that. He wanted to be the quarterback for the Georgia Bulldogs.”
Don’t underestimate tough love in the equation. It remains in play, as seen in a tense moment Saturday night when Smart lit into Bennett. Even after the comeback, he still didn’t sound like he trusted old Stet. “He showed great competitive character, but he’s got to play within our system and he’s got to do what he’s coached to do or you can’t win games,” Smart barked. “He must play better if we expect to win the next one.”
His teammates, too, were restrained in praise. “The job’s not done yet,” Kenny McIntosh said. “He’s still got to do it one more time. Once he does that, you can call him whatever you want.”
You know what’s next: Bennett will use it as fuel on Jan. 9.
These days, Smart is bullish and clear about Bennett’s future when NFL personnel men call. Critics remain, some comparing him to A.J. McCarron, who won two national titles at Alabama and fizzled on the next level. “His mental capability, his ability to process information — so much of the NFL game is what you can do pre-snap and post-snap. He'll be as good as anybody at the pre-snap. He just has to continue that into the post-snap,” Smart said. “I think he's going to get that opportunity. You can't play at the level he's played at and not get that opportunity.”
Whether he starts in the NFL or sits, Bennett isn’t one to lose sight of reality. His off days are spent buried in books, such as a recent project: a Winston Churchill biography. “I’ve played football all my life. It’s the same game I’ve played since I was 9 years old. But somehow, I can separate myself,” he said. “When you say starting quarterback at the University of Georgia, I’m up at the Heisman Trophy ceremony, I’m like ‘Oh.’ It almost doesn’t seem (real). I see stuff on Twitter, but it’s almost like they’re not talking about me. They’re talking about the quarterback at Georgia.
“Those pats on the back feel good. Then you start to believe what they've told you, and it's not true. Good or bad, what they tell you is never true. And then you literally forget how you did it. It's the craziest thing in the world, but that's how you do it. You don't listen to that voice inside your head that tells you after the second time you've missed your workout, ‘All right, you've celebrated long enough. Now it's time to go.' And then you keep doing it. You don't do what you did last year, when you were hungry and there really was no other option if you wanted to keep playing here but to win. People lose track of that. People lose track of how they felt before. They start to give more to the bright lights, all the shiny and glittery stuff, and football's not about that. It's football, and it's always going to be football.”
In his mind, he’ll never stop being Stet from Blackshear. To the rest of the world he’s a rock star, a craze sure to thrive this week in the entertainment capital, where much more than TCU awaits him. In and of itself, his story is hard to believe. It’s harder to believe when the calendar says it’s 2023.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.