Heavy mettle: More than brawn, Georgia has what it takes to win it all

In a careening and tense best-of-three NCAA Super Regional, Georgia survived Mississippi State by taking the Game 2 clincher Sunday 11-9 in 10 innings before a sold-out crowd at Foley Field.

The way they did it spoke clearly that the Bulldogs (the advancing ones, not the ones whose season just ended) will be, at the very least, a very large handful for whoever takes the diamond against them in Omaha starting next weekend.

Mississippi State coach Brian O’Connor, who won the CWS with Virginia and made seven trips to Omaha, called the Bulldogs “absolutely capable of winning the national championship” and “one of the best lineups in my coaching career” that he had faced.

Saturday, Georgia escaped a 7-0 crater after 3 ½ innings to take leads of 9-7 and 10-9 only to fall behind 12-10 with five outs left, and then won 13-12.

Sunday, it was a reverse of this Bulldogs-Bulldogs matchup, with Georgia gaining a 7-2 lead after five innings only for Mississippi State to rally and take a 9-8 lead going into the ninth. (Georgia was the designated visiting team.)

With back-to-back-to-back home runs in the seventh and then a two-out, two-run shot in the bottom of the eighth, the maroon-colored Bulldogs had grabbed every last molecule of momentum in the humid air and were two outs from forcing Game 3.

The Georgia flight to Omaha was suddenly facing a delay potentially lasting anywhere from 24 hours to 12 months. More scarred Bulldogs fans who had seen this team fall short in seven consecutive NCAA appearances since 2008 surely feared the latter possibility.

But a team doesn’t win the SEC regular-season and tournament titles by succumbing in weighty moments.

On a 1-2 pitch, Brennan Hudson singled to score Kenny Ishikawa to tie the game at nine.

Summoned a day after his 20-pitch save on Saturday, reliever Justin Byrd delivered a 1-2-3 inning in the bottom of the ninth to send it to extras, where national player of the year candidate Daniel Jackson hammered his 31st home run of the year, a two-run job for the final 11-9 lead. Byrd came back out in the bottom of the 10th to close it down and ignite a celebration 18 years in the making.

“Strike three and Georgia is going to the College World Series!” was Georgia voice Jeff Dantzler’s radio call. “Justin Byrd closes it out and the Dawgs have punched a ticket to Omaha!”

Saturday: Two runs down with five outs left.

Sunday: After giving up a five-run lead, one run down with two outs left.

Georgia won both, beating Mississippi State for the fifth and sixth times this season against no defeats and crumbling maroon and white hearts into a million tiny pieces.

Besides cattle gridlock, what can happen in Omaha that could rattle the Bulldogs?

Given Georgia’s prowess at overpowering opponents – the Bulldogs rank in the top five nationally in batting average, slugging percentage, home runs and scoring, among other categories – it would be easy to assume that coach Wes Johnson has styled a team that bludgeons teams into submission and calls it a day.

But the weekend’s events at Foley Field made it clear that there’s more to the Bulldogs - the tournament’s highest remaining national seed (No. 3) - than that.

After the game, Johnson spoke of training his players to be tough – not merely physically but to develop the perseverance and mental strength to play unrelentingly until the final out.

“Not only do we talk about it, we practice it – we try to give our guys something hard to do every single day, whether it be physical or mental,” he said. “And you just saw a bunch of resilient guys and you saw the fruition of all that work come through.”

The moment was real for Johnson, hired three years ago this past Friday. After the Bulldogs returned from celebrating the Omaha berth with the well-served hundreds on Kudzu Hill beyond right field, Johnson squeezed wife Angie in a tight embrace by the home dugout.

Speaking with media afterwards, he was overcome with emotion and pounded the table as he thanked Jesus, Angie and Charlie Condon, the latter the former Georgia star and first-round draft pick who stayed in Athens after Johnson was hired rather than transfer. (Being included in that trio has to make Condon feel pretty good.)

“People don’t understand the sacrifices you make to do that, the birthdays you miss, the anniversaries,” said Johnson, asked what it meant to pilot the Bulldogs to Omaha in his third season. “Yeah – a lot.”

Johnson, who was Arkansas’ pitching coach when it reached the CWS finals in 2018 and held the same role for LSU’s championship in 2023, offered this noteworthy nugget about what it takes to win it all in college baseball’s mecca.

“There’s going to be a lot of emotions,” he said. “It’s the teams who have belief, slow the game down and just keep playing.”

Hmm.

Sound like a team you know?

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