ATLANTA — With Georgia winning a wild, unforgettable Peach Bowl on Saturday night, they're now due to face the TCU Horned Frogs in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game.
The game will mark the fifth time the two teams have met going back through the last 80 years.
According to TCU's website, their previous meetings were in 2016, 1988, 1980 and 1942. The Bulldogs have won all four.
These were those games:
- 2016 Liberty Bowl, Dec. 30, 2016, UGA 31-23: Nick Chubb ran for 142 yards and Sony Michel added 88, with Chubb scoring with 2:48 to go for the final score. This was actually a pretty competitive game, and at one point TCU led 16-7 and pulled ahead in the third 23-21 - it's not quite comparable to the Peach Bowl comeback Georgia needed against Ohio State, but there's a similar vibe there.
- Sept. 10, 1988, UGA 38-10: TCU was in the Southwest Conference at the time, smack dab in the middle of a stretch of six straight losing seasons. The Dawgs, meanwhile, were in their final season under Vince Dooley. The Dawgs opened this season with a win over Tennessee, and rose from No. 12 in the rankings to No. 6 after a subsequent win over Mississippi State, but their season mostly began to peter out the following week with a loss to South Carolina.
- Sept. 27, 1980, UGA 34-3: At this time, the Dawgs and Horned Frogs hadn't played in nearly 40 years. The reunion was unremarkable - TCU would win just one game that season, while Georgia was on the way to an undefeated season and the national championship. The score reflected those trajectories.
- 1942 Orange Bowl, Jan. 1, 1942, UGA 40-26: UGA went 9-1-1 this season and headed to Miami for their first ever bowl game, to face a TCU team that had gone 7-3, but were only a few years removed from what is their only national championship in 1938. According to the Orange Bowl's official history, Georgia quarterback Frankie Sinkwich (who'd win the Heisman the following season) "put on an offensive display still considered by many as the greatest in any bowl game" with 355 all-purpose yards, three passing touchdowns and one rushing touchdown. The final score makes the game seem closer than it was - UGA went into the fourth quarter with a 40-14 lead that was never truly threatened.