Ranking the 10 best College Football Playoff games — SkimNews
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- Georgia's 54-48 overtime win over Oklahoma in the 2017 Rose Bowl CFP semifinal tops a ranking of the era's 10 best playoff games, with the two teams combining for 1,058 yards of offense.
- Sony Michel rushed 11 times for 181 yards and three touchdowns, and Nick Chubb added 146 yards and two scores on 14 carries — 13.0 yards per carry between them — while Baker Mayfield threw for 287 yards and two scores, rushed for 44 yards and caught a touchdown pass.
- Future NFL first-rounders Hollywood Brown and CeeDee Lamb combined for 14 catches, 180 yards, a touchdown catch and a touchdown pass, while Jake Fromm went 20-of-29 for 210 yards and two scores to lead Georgia's late tying drive.
- Oklahoma led 31-17 at halftime with a 92.6% win probability before Georgia rallied, capped by Rodrigo Blankenship's 55-yard field goal at the buzzer after a squib-kick clock incident that preserved one second on the clock.
- Lincoln Riley's decision to kick a field goal on fourth-and-2 in the first overtime rather than going for the win — after Roquan Smith stopped Jordan Smallwood short — is highlighted as a turning point that cost Oklahoma its best shot.
- Lorenzo Carter blocked a 27-yard Seibert field goal in the second overtime, and Sony Michel scored the winning 27-yard touchdown run to send Georgia to the national title game.
- Oklahoma visits Georgia on Saturday (3:30 p.m. ET on ESPN) as the Bulldogs' first opponent since that 2017 Rose Bowl, installed as a two-touchdown favorite — a sequel the article concedes is almost impossible to match.
Why it matters: Saturday's rematch between two of college football's 11 winningest programs arrives with Georgia favored by two touchdowns, signaling that the sequel is unlikely to approach a 1,058-yard classic that featured seven win-probability swings of 15% or more. The original swung on a blocked field goal, a fourth-down stop, and a clock anomaly on a squib kick — a confluence the source explicitly suggests cannot be replicated.
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