Georgia football: Who’s your quarterback in the clutch?

The Georgia football program may be known for running backs, but some pretty darned good quarterbacks have played between the hedges as well.

If you’re a Georgia football fan, you know all too well the agony of “a few yards more”.  Especially over the last couple of decades, the Bulldogs have seen some glorious opportunities slip away, including what should have been a national championship in 2018.

Rest assured, more opportunities will come and some new names will be uttered among the greats of all time. But while we’re waiting for the world to return to some sense of normalcy from the coronavirus pandemic, it seemed like a good time to play a little game of “what if”.

So we put the question out on social media for fans to give us their thoughts, and here’s the situation we proposed.

“What if” for Georgia football fans

What if the Bulldogs were in a national championship game with two minutes left to play in the fourth quarter, and the Dawgs needed a touchdown to secure the win … who would you want to be your quarterback?

We offered six modern-day alternatives.

Eric Zeier (1991-1994)
David Greene (2001-2004)
D.J. Shockley  (2002-2005)
Matthew Stafford (2006-2008)
Aaron Murray (2010-2013)
Jake Fromm (20170-2019)

We left Buck Belue off this list since he already did his job and helped lead the Bulldogs to a title.

But of those six quarterbacks — all of whom were some of the best to ever play at Georgia — who would fans trust with the ball to win the big one for the Bulldogs.

Some of the answers were surprising, to be honest.

Of all the responses on Facebook and Twitter, here’s how the percentages break down:

28.57 percent wanted Matthew Stafford
23.38 percent wanted D.J. Shockley
19.48 percent wanted David Greene
15.58 percent wanted Aaron Murray
6.49 percent wanted Eric Zeier
5.19 percent wanted Jake Fromm

And then we had the one holdout for Al Bundy …

It’s surprising we didn’t get an Uncle Rico in there as well.

But overwhelmingly it seems fans would trust either Stafford or Shockley more. Perhaps it’s because we got to see so little of them in their roles compared to the other quarterbacks, and they never really got the shot at a title so many felt they deserved.

Were this game being played today, it seems like Shockley would be the best choice. He’s that dual-threat guy that perplexes so many defenses in modern college football, and he had one heck of an arm that we got to see far too little of.

Murray and Fromm were the closest to having shots at this than any of the above-mentioned QBs, while Murray simply ran out of time (why Mark Richt didn’t have him spike it is still a mystery) and Fromm couldn’t quite get past the Alabama bugaboo.

So what would you say between the final two? Shockley, or Stafford?