Doubt Stetson Bennett at Your Own Risk

The QB has heard it all during his winding path to be Georgia's starter. He opens up about fan negativity, his decision to return to Athens and more.

There are people freshly doubting Stetson Bennett, and let me tell you that this comes as a revelation to the Georgia quarterback. What a shock. Like, this has never happened before—other than at every single step of his college journey, starting the day he reported to the locker room in Athens.

The disrespect was immediate.

Bennett’s locker assignment when he joined the team in 2017 as a walk-on: No. 122A. His walk-on roommate was 122B. In other words, they shared the same locker. The scholarship guys weren’t sharing space like that.

His assigned jersey number: 22, which could have been construed as a less-than-subtle invitation to change positions. Or quit.

Bennett has thrown 24 touchdowns this season, against seven interceptions :: Joshua L. Jones/USA TODAY NETWORK

“That sucked,” Bennett says with a laugh. “I mean, talk about a humbling experience. I was the rare quarterback who was excited to be on the scout team so I could wear the other team’s quarterback number. At least then I looked like an actual quarterback and not an idiot.”

So please excuse Bennett if he fails to despair when informed that, heading into the Orange Bowl Playoff semifinal against Michigan on Friday, some people do not believe he is up to the task of quarterbacking these Bulldogs to the national championship. He’s been paddling upstream in the fast-flowing River of Doubt for years now, without a hint of fatigue.

Every single time Bennett was expected to be brushed aside, to accept life as a backup to the many highly-rated QBs who have come and gone at Georgia, he has simply paddled harder and returned to the top of the depth chart. As an under-recruited outlier on a roster flush with blue-chip talent, Bennett’s persistent starting status has produced some downright nasty reactions in a fan base starving for a national title. The product of Blackshear, Ga., could do some remarkable readings of mean tweets in his southern lilt.

“If my mom said it, it would hurt my feelings,” Bennett says. “But these guys—the Twitter guys, or whatever they are—I don’t pay two cents to ’em. But it is weird, though. They’re like, fans of the team, and some of them are wishing I get hurt or something. I’m like, ‘Good Lord, I’m glad I’m not in your family, because you sound like a miserable person.’

“I’m not a big revenge guy. I don’t think you can want to get revenge and say you don’t care what people say. Those two things don’t go together. I don’t care what they say, so I don’t have to prove them wrong or anything like that.”

The River of Doubt has reached a flood stage now, though. Bennett is coming off his worst starting performance of the year on the biggest stage to date. He threw two interceptions and was dramatically outplayed by Alabama freshman Bryce Young in the Southeastern Conference championship game. After Georgia’s first loss of the season, it didn’t take long for the biggest reason for defeat—Georgia’s top-ranked defense being shockingly strafed—to give way to renewed skepticism about Bennett’s ability against elite competition.

All season, he’d been plenty good enough when the Bulldogs were throttling opposing offenses. But what happens when the defense isn’t bulletproof? What happens when Georgia isn’t dictating terms? What happens if (when) it needs to win a shootout?

Is Stetson Bennett still good enough in those scenarios?

Bennett and Georgia had their worst game of the season in the Bulldogs' SEC title game loss to Alabama :: Joshua L. Jones/USA TODAY NETWORK

He got a strong vote of confidence Tuesday from offensive coordinator Todd Monken. In Monken’s first press availability since preseason—it’s a Kirby Smart thing, which is to say that it’s an acquired Nick Saban thing—he was all-in on Bennett.

“There's no doubt in my mind we can win the national championship,” Monken says. “There's no doubt in my mind we can win it with Stetson Bennett."

Monken has seen Bennett put himself on track to become Georgia’s single-season pass efficiency leader—even with the performance against Alabama. Bennett’s current efficiency rating is 176.85, a smidge better than the school record of 174.82 set by Aaron Murray in 2012. He’s also just ahead of Murray’s career efficiency mark, but Bennett figures to have another season in a Georgia uniform in ’22, so that remains to be seen.

Regardless of the record book, Bennett had a very good regular season. Even if it was largely in a complementary role to a great defense, he routinely made big plays passing and running when called upon.

“If you look at the plays he's made, he's made national championship plays,” Monken says. “He has. You turn on the film and look at some of the throws he makes, the decisions he makes, the things he does with his feet.

“We went into the [SEC] championship game with Stetson Bennett as our quarterback as a favorite over a team that hasn't been an underdog in over five years. That ought to tell you about our quarterback and how he played, and [for] some reason we get into this stereotyping of players based on where they were at some point—be it one was a walk-on, one was a five star, whatever. If you just look at the production and what he's done for our football team, it's impressive.”

More than anything, what Bennett has worked for at Georgia is the opportunity to step on the field without that stereotype following him. Call him a quarterback, not a former walk-on. Don’t compare his recruiting rankings to Justin Fields or Jake Fromm or Jamie Newman or D’wan Mathis or JT Daniels or any of the more celebrated QBs who have been ahead of him at some point in time—or repeated points in time—on the depth chart.

Bennett walked on at the in-state school believing he belonged. That’s why he turned down offers from smaller programs, to test his belief.

“I just thought the path would be easier and the regret would be less to go here [out of high school], try it out, see what happens,” Bennett says. “And then I could go somewhere else if it didn’t work out, rather than going to a smaller school, balling out, and never having that chance here. I didn’t want that regret.”

Bennett wound up running the scout team offense his freshman season, and did it well enough that it irritated Smart. Coaches want their scout teamers to give the starters a good look at what the opposition will be doing on Saturdays—but they also want to see the starters dominate what is supposed to be the lesser competition. Bennett sometimes made that difficult.

Bennett says the scout team record for “reloads”—when the coach demands a play be run again, until the starters win the rep—was 12 or 13. The graduate assistant in charge of the scout team put together a video splice of “Kirb Stomps,” with Smart throwing play sheets or storming around the practice field in displeasure. The quarterback assigned jersey No. 22 enjoyed that video.

But the path to playing time remained blocked when Fields came to Georgia as the No. 1 quarterback prospect in the nation, so Bennett transferred to Jones County Junior College in Mississippi. After one season there, he was prepared to sign with Louisiana when Georgia came calling again on National Signing Day with an offer to come back on scholarship.

“I’d already made my mind up,” Bennett says.

Georgia said it needed a decision immediately. Bennett resisted.

“I’m not going to give you an answer now,” he recalls saying. “Because it’s a pretty big decision. You can hold that offer in your hand, or I’ll just go to the school I’ve already picked, because I was fine this morning. I’m not going to come crawling back on my knees.”

Bennett consulted his parents, Stetson III and Denise, both of whom are Georgia graduates. Denise was against his return, Stetson III was in favor. Stetson IV had always wanted to be a Bulldog, but he wasn’t interested in just wearing the uniform and holding a clipboard or signaling in plays.

“I’m not going to sit here and be a frat kid on the football team,” he says. “I’m going to go play football.”

Bennett pays no mind to social media negativity from Bulldogs fans about his play :: Bob Self/Florida Times-Union/USA TODAY NETWORK

Knowing that Fields was transferring, Bennett figured Fromm would turn pro after the 2019 season and he could, at last, have a shot at playing football. He even started some games after Fromm was banged up, and acquitted himself well. The decision to come back to Georgia was based on having two years as the starter if he won the position, and he believed he earned that shot.

“I played all my cards on Fromm leaving, and it made me look like a smart man,” Bennett says, then laughs. “Then this whole fiasco happened.”

The “fiasco” began with Newman and Daniels both transferring in for the 2020 season, from Wake Forest and USC, respectively. But Newman opted out before the season began and Daniels was still rehabbing a knee injury, so Bennett figured he had his shot.

That didn’t come to pass immediately. Georgia went with Mathis at first. He was ineffective, to say the least, and Smart turned to Bennett while the Bulldogs fan base impatiently waited for Daniels to be cleared and take over.

“It was tough at some points,” Bennett says. “I’ve always been the guy to just say, ‘Give me a chance.’ If somebody beats me out, that’s fine. I wasn’t given a chance when I was told I would get one. I was like, ‘Good lord, what am I doing here? We’ve got a fifth-string safety taking more reps than me and I’ve started 4–5 games here.’ That was difficult to get through, but I leaned on my family and they helped me get through it.”

Bennett played poorly in a three-game stretch of 2020 that included losses to eventual national champion Alabama and eventual East Division winner Florida. The position at last fell to Daniels for the last four games of the season, and that’s the way 2021 began as well.

Daniels started the opener against Clemson, a 10–3 defensive slog in which neither team scored an offensive touchdown. But he came out of that game with an oblique injury, which put Bennett back in the starting lineup against UAB. He responded with five touchdown passes on 12 attempts, a dazzling performance that didn’t change the equation; Daniels returned to the starting job for the next two games.

But Daniels was hurt again in the victory over Vanderbilt, and Bennett has owned the position since then. He was great in a succession of high-profile games against Arkansas, Auburn and Kentucky, then good enough in a blowout of Florida—particularly when he followed an anxiety-inducing interception with a touchdown bomb to Kearis Jackson on his next pass.

After that series of plays, a family friend texted Stetson III: “You better hope Stet never commits a crime, because he has zero remorse.”

Mostly, Bennett has a limitless reservoir of internal confidence—perhaps even borderline cockiness. But he’s also a stern self-critic.

At the end of that freshman season running the scout team, he went back and watched the film from those practices. “I wanted to see how good I was, pat myself on the back,” Bennett says. “Then I looked at it and I was like, ‘Wow, I was pretty awful.’”

Applying that unsparing lens year over year has led to significant improvement. Critics who disparaged Bennett’s ability to stretch the field vertically early in his career should know that he’s second in the nation in yards per attempt, at 10.1. Critics who questioned whether a QB listed at 5' 11" can get the job done should know that he’s run for 251 yards this season as an underrated dual threat.

Even as Georgia has built a 12–1 record, the shadow of Daniels (No. 18) has loomed over Bennett's starting job :: Joshua L. Jones/USA TODAY NETWORK

He’s simply been a much better quarterback in 2021 than he was in the previous two seasons. Fewer bad decisions, more good ones.

Then came the record-scratch performance against Alabama. And then came the COVID-19 omicron variant, which sent Daniels into quarantine and has kept him out of practice heading into the Orange Bowl (Daniels arrived in Miami on Monday evening). Fans anticipating that Bennett could be benched—or at least face a quick hook—in favor of Daniels had to re-set expectations yet again. This is the noise Bennett is tuning out.

“I wouldn't listen to myself if I was giving a speech on heart surgery,” he says. “Not comparing football to heart surgery, but it's the same kind of gist. So why would I listen to somebody who doesn't do this for a living and just watches it happen? All I'm thinking about is beating Michigan and being the best quarterback I can be for my teammates.”

It looks certain Stetson Bennett will start against Michigan, and increasingly likely that he will finish as well. He has to handle the pressure—both in theory and literally, with All-American defensive ends Aidan Hutchinson and David Ojabo coming at him off the edge. He has to be good enough, as a former walk-on surrounded by four-star and five-star recruits on what might be the most talented team in the country. He has to keep paddling upstream in the fast-flowing River of Doubt.