Joel Klatt is one of many who believes Georgia could have won the national championship in 2023.

On his podcast this week, Klatt was asked which teams would have won a national title as a lower seed had a 12-team Playoff been in place in past years. He altered the prompt slightly to give three Playoff-era teams (since 2014) that missed the CFP but could have won it all had they been selected. Unsurprisingly, the Bulldogs were one of the three.

“This one is obvious. I know everyone’s going to be like, ‘Well, duh.’ Last year’s Georgia team,” Klatt said. “Back-to-back defending national champions, 29-game win streak, (they) lose a game to Alabama in the SEC Championship (and) get left out of the Playoff.

“That’s a team that absolutely could have won the national championship. In fact, they would have been Michigan’s most difficult matchup in the country. But, they didn’t go and Michigan won the national championship. They were No. 1 all season, 29 straight wins. That’s an easy one.”

It’s almost poetic that the final year of the four-team Playoff gave us perhaps the best example yet of a team being excluded from the postseason despite possessing just about every attribute of a championship team.

Georgia had the pedigree. It had the talent. It had the experience. Georgia had a top-five offense and a top-15 defense by efficiency. It had the third-best scoring differential of any team in the country, had a top-20 red zone offense, and the nation’s best third-down defense.

In so many ways, it was a team without a fatal flaw. And a three-point championship game loss to another Playoff participant was all that stood between the Bulldogs and a chance to three-peat.

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After Georgia was excluded from the field and sent to the Orange Bowl to face Florida State, the “best” vs. “most deserving” debate raged. It’s a conversation that has long been part of the CFP discourse, but an expansion to 12 teams could mitigate that.

Had a 12-team postseason model been in place for 2023, Georgia would have been able to play for a title. So, too, would teams like Missouri, Penn State, Ole Miss, and Liberty. Deserving? Certainly.

But would those teams have been able to win the title? Ole Miss lost to both Georgia and Alabama in the regular season, both games by double-digits. Mizzou lost to Georgia by nine. Penn State lost to Michigan and Ohio State in the regular season, then to Ole Miss in the Peach Bowl. Liberty didn’t play a single Power Five team until Oregon ripped it apart in the Fiesta Bowl.

There were arguments to be made Georgia wasn’t the most deserving after it lost its conference title game. It was much tougher to argue Georgia wasn’t one of the four best. Since 2014, teams like the 2023 Bulldogs have been left with maddening hypotheticals. Starting next season, they’ll presumably have more of a chance to make their case on the field.