Georgia blows out TCU in title game

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - The national championship hopes ended early for TCU.

Georgia took all the suspense as well as the Horned Frogs out of the game before halftime.

By the time the end came in the College Football Playoff title game, the Bulldogs had their second consecutive championship with a 65-7 win. Georgia (15-0) became the first repeat national champion since Alabama in 2011 and '12. Quarterback Stetson Bennett threw four touchdown passes and ran for two more.

"It's special," Bennett said. "It seems like the past three or four months, we've been looking to see if somebody could beat us, and we ran out of games. Nobody could."

It was the biggest blowout in the BCS/CFP era. The biggest previous margin was USC's 55-19 takedown of Oklahoma to end the 2004 season.

"Anybody that saw that could see that we certainly didn't play our best," first-year coach Sonny Dykes said.

TCU (13-2), seeking its first national title since 1938, still had its dream season, one that fans and alumni will talk about for decades. They'll talk about first-year coach Dykes and the special season of quarterback Max Duggan and all those against-all-odds comebacks.

The story just won't include a national championship trophy, victory cigars galore and confetti falling from the rafters, like Georgia got.

"Tonight isn't going to take away from this season and what we were able to do as a program," Duggan said. "I don't think that's going to define all the good memories and all the success that we had this season to project and put this program in the right direction and moving forward."

The state of Texas and the Big 12 still hasn't hoisted the trophy since Texas' Vince Young scampered into the end zone against USC in the 2006 Rose Bowl.

At least TCU knows how much it has to improve its program to compete against the best. For the moment and the immediate future, Georgia remains the undisputed standard. By the time the Bulldogs scored 28 unanswered to end the first half up 38-7, the only key question was how many CFP records would fall.

Back in 2016, TCU had trailed Oregon 31-0 at halftime in the Alamo Bowl. Gary Patterson, then coaching the Horned Frogs, changed his sweat-soaked shirt at halftime and TCU rallied to win. Even with Patterson in the building to watch his former team, there were no such heroics this time.

Dykes noted "uncharacteristic" things his team did after calling it "wide-eyed" at halftime on ESPN.

"We just dug such a big hole for ourselves," Dykes said. "We never could quite get them stopped defensively. We never could get out of our own way on offense."

The resiliency and grit that had taken TCU from a team picked seventh in the Big 12 to the verge of a championship weren't enough.

"They always believed in themselves and they always rolled their sleeves up and worked incredibly hard and competed every single second of every day and you couldn't ask for more than that," Dykes said.

"Again I'm disappointed we didn't make a better show tonight because that's not indicative of who we are.

"We'll look back. It's going to take some time for the sting to go away, I assure you. But we'll look back on the season and build on it from here."