Yet, the player most essential to the Bulldogs’ two championships was someone not even Georgia wanted.
Bennett, who grew up in speck-on-the-map Blackshear, Ga., did not have a scholarship from a Football Bowl Subdivision school, so he headed up to Athens in 2017 as a walk-on, intent on working his way into the starting quarterback job.
A year later, Justin Fields, the top quarterback prospect in the country, showed up and those fealties to the school he grew up rooting for didn’t mean much. Bennett wanted to play. So off he went to a Mississippi junior college.
“When I left, I thought it was deuces out forever from U.G.A.; I didn’t think I was coming back,” Bennett, who stands 5-foot-11 and weighs 190 pounds, said on Saturday. “I kind of knew when I pulled the trigger that, hey, I’m not here at Georgia just to hang out and be on the team and have some footballs in 30 years. I want to play ball. I want to do what I think I can do.”
When Bennett returned a year later, he did so only when Georgia offered him a scholarship on signing day to keep him from going to Louisiana-Lafayette.
Georgia still didn’t know what it had.
The offensive coordinator Todd Monken, who arrived just as the coronavirus pandemic hit, was trying to parse through a crowded quarterbacks room, attempting to find reps for Jamie Newman, a transfer from Wake Forest, J.T. Daniels, a transfer from Southern California, and a pair of prized freshmen, D’Wan Mathis and Carson Beck.
