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Hayes: Dawg gone? No way. Carson Beck returned to Georgia to win it all
By Matt Hayes
Published:
DALLAS — He sat there in a baby blue suit, trimmed neatly with a white turtleneck, a fat gold chain and a diamond-studded watch worth more than the annual salary of just about every non-football coach in the joint.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce the value of patience.
And persistence.
Carson Beck could’ve done what so many college football quarterbacks in the age of free player movement have. Could’ve taken the disappointing news 3 years ago, hopped in the transfer portal and changed everything to avoid reality.
“I wasn’t mature enough to handle that I wasn’t going to be the starter,” Beck said Tuesday during SEC Media Days.
Now here we are, 3 years removed from a whirlwind week in 2021, when Beck — then the backup quarterback at Georgia behind starter JT Daniels — was given the starting job after an injury to Daniels in the season opener. And then lost it during game week practice.
He told family and friends in Jacksonville, Fla., all week he would start against UAB. Come on up, he said, it’s a celebration.
Then Georgia coach Kirby Smart, after Beck struggled all week in practice, told Beck on Friday before the game that the team was moving forward with Stetson Bennett.
Georgia won back-to-back national titles with Bennett; Beck stewed for months before understanding the only person who could change his situation was the guy staring back at him in the mirror. Not another school.
Not another coaching staff, or another system, or another quarterbacks coach. He admits the portal is good for some — and there’s no denying it is — but his value wasn’t changing until he changed how it developed.
On the field with practice and preparation, off the field by living well and making smart decisions. He sat behind Bennett for 2 long years, 2 years of watching unthinkable success further delaying his clock and the ultimate goal of playing in the NFL.
“It took a while to snap out of it,” Beck said. “I didn’t handle it well at all.”
It should come as no surprise then, that when the opportunity arrived in January to leave for the NFL, to walk away from Georgia after a strong 2023 in his first season as the starter, he looked back at the previous 3 years and once again embraced the value of patience and persistence.
He could’ve left for the NFL and might have been a top-10 pick. Could’ve left college with that empty feeling after last year’s SEC Championship Game loss to Alabama derailed Georgia’s 3-peat train and — fair or not — left him as the quarterback of the team that didn’t make the Playoff.
In this quarterback-driven sport, there is no more important position. There is no bigger burden.
So yeah, there was something to prove. To himself, to his teammates, to NFL scouts.
It also helped that he could earn as much money as late 1st-round picks in the NFL Draft through NIL deals. That ability to earn by playing the sport — the biggest reason many players leave college early — played a significant role in returning to Athens.
Make no mistake, he’s motivated by getting Georgia back to the top of the mountain in college football, by eliminating that feeling — “it sucked” — of losing in the SEC Championship Game.
But NIL made that decision a lot easier. He’s driving a Lamborghini now (responsibly, he said,), and he wants for nothing. Off the field, anyway.
On the field, there’s Year 2 under offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Mike Bobo. There’s a desire to have a stronger voice, to be more vocal with his teammates and more active in doing and showing why he has the second-best odds to win the Heisman Trophy.
He’s a long way from the 19-year-old who was cut deep when told he wouldn’t be the starting quarterback of a championship-ready team.
“I wish we could inject a chip (into players) so that every kid had that response,” Smart said of Beck’s decision to persevere and stay in Athens instead of searching for a soft portal landing spot.
Beck says this isn’t a story about the ills of the transfer portal. It’s about finding out who and what you are, and what you truly want.
Or in the words of college football legend Nick Saban, “easy” and “great” aren’t friends.
It wasn’t easy to suck it up and admit he was the problem. It wasn’t easy to sit in that locker room last December in Atlanta, and realize it can all go away with a few bad plays while Alabama celebrated on the other side of the stadium.
This season won’t be easy, either. Georgia has an unusually tough schedule, including road SEC games against Playoff contenders Alabama, Texas and Ole Miss.
And let’s face it, everyone wants a piece of the guy driving a Lambo and flashing that sharp diamond-studded watch.
“Everybody is coming after us,” Beck said. “We’ve been through this before.”
Don’t ever underestimate the value of patience and persistence.
Matt Hayes is a national college football writer for Saturday Down South. You can hear him daily from 12-3 p.m. on 1010XL in Jacksonville. Follow on Twitter @MattHayesCFB
