Sanford Stadium in Athens; via Wikipedia.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JAN. 13, 2023 | Most Georgians, even us stalwart Georgia Tech fans, must be elated at the way the Georgia Bulldogs dominated the college championship game in defeating Texas Christian University 65-7. Yes, I’ll admit I was worried about playing TCU, for the manner it had shown in its 13-0 regular season, often coming back to win every game.
Yet Georgia played an almost perfect game. We saw Georgia make three mistakes.
First, it let a TCU player get behind the defense in the first quarter, and this play went for a large gain.
Second, a few plays later, TCU scored a touchdown on a short quarterback run. But that was to be its only score.
Georgia’s third error was missing the extra point after Georgia’s ninth touchdown.
But hey, nobody’s perfect.
Some diehards may say that the Georgia team was running up the score. You can charge that off by saying that about all Georgia did was to score on almost every time they had the ball. Football teams don’t hold back. And once freshmen were put in, why, of course, they wanted to score.
And at about every turn, the TCU defense was inept over and over. It could have been worse.
Then we remembered hearing about other blowouts.
On Dec. 8, 1940, the Chicago Bears trounced the Washington Redskins in the National Football League (NFL) Championship by a score of 73-0, the largest margin of defeat in NFL history.
The Bears, coached by George Halas, brought a 6-2 record to their regular-season meeting with the Redskins in Washington on Nov. 17, 1940. After Chicago lost 3-7, the Redskins owner, George Preston Marshall, told reporters that Halas and his team were “quitters” and “cry babies.” Halas used Marshall’s words to galvanize his players, and the Bears scored 78 points in its next two games to set up a showdown with the Redskins in the league’s championship game on December 8, also in Washington.
Less than a minute into the game, the Bears’ running back Bill Osmanski ran 68 yards to score the first touchdown. After the Redskins narrowly missed an opportunity to tie the game, the Bears clamped down and began to dominate, leaving the field at halftime with a 28-0 lead. Things only got worse for the Redskins, and by the end of the second half officials were asking Halas not to let his team kick for extra points, as they were running out of footballs after too many had been kicked into the stands.
For playoff games in the NFL, the record for the biggest playoff blowout belongs to the Jacksonville Jaguars, which demolished the Miami Dolphins 62-7 in the AFC Divisional round on Nov.8, 2022.
These are examples, similar to Georgia’s 65-7 blowout over TCU, where a coach, in this case Kirby Smart, used the previous game, the 42-41 squeaky victory over Ohio State, to psychologically challenge his team to play at peak performance in the championship. It worked!
One more record: Georgia Tech people will tell you about the most lop-sided football game ever. That was on Oct. 7, 1916, between the Cumberland College Bulldogs and the Georgia Tech Engineers on the Engineers’ home field of Grant Field in Atlanta. Georgia Tech defeated the Bulldogs 222–0.
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