NASCAR: Chase Elliott may have started a long-awaited trend

Chase Elliott’s 2020 NASCAR Cup Series championship-winning season may have started a huge wave of momentum for Georgia sports.

When NASCAR headed to Phoenix Raceway last November for the Championship 4, it had only been a few weeks since the Atlanta Braves blew a 3-1 lead in the NLCS to the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers.

The whole concept of choking was nothing new for Georgia sports fans, who now had an infamous 3-1 lead joke of their own with which to deal — to go along with all the other jokes made at their expense.

None more famous, of course, than the one brought on them by Tom Brady and Bill Belichick in February 2017.

Trailing 28-3 in the third quarter of Super Bowl LI, the New England Patriots were dead in the water. The Boston Globe had already picked out a headline — “A Bitter End” — with a picture of Brady on the ground as Robert Alford gave the Atlanta Falcons a 21-0 lead with a pick-six before halftime.

Slowly but sure, the tides turned, and the Patriots found a way to overcome the 25-point deficit and take the Falcons to overtime tied at 28. Naturally, New England won the coin toss, went right down the field and ended the game with a touchdown, winning by a score of 34-28 to secure Brady his fifth (of now seven) rings.

Never before in 50 previous Super Bowls had a team overcome a deficit of more than 10 points and won. Now, all you have to say is “28-3”, and people know exactly what you’re talking about.

The following January, the Georgia Bulldogs held a 13-0 halftime lead over the Alabama Crimson Tide at halftime in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game. They led their SEC rivals 20-7 in the third quarter, but Alabama roared back to tie it at 20 after replacing starting quarterback Jalen Hurts with Tua Tagovailoa, forcing overtime.

Georgia took the early 23-20 lead in overtime and then got a huge sack of Tagovailoa to put the Crimson Tide in near-desperation mode.

Didn’t matter; championship-winning touchdown from Tagovailoa to DeVonta Smith on the next play.

The following season, the two teams met in the SEC Championship Game. Georgia opened up leads of 21-7 and 28-14, but the script was flipped. This time, it was Hurts replacing Tagovailoa.

Once again, Alabama roared back, winning this one by a score of 35-28.

So as soon as the Braves got up 3-1 on the Dodgers last October, everybody in Georgia already knew the win-loss outcomes of the next three games.

Ordinarily, you wouldn’t associate individual competitors with entire markets/fanbases — especially when that individual competitor is an athlete from outside the stick/ball sport realm.

But ahead of that November race weekend last year, I literally had someone tell me that Chase Elliott had no chance at winning the 2020 championship simply because of this Georgia “curse” and that he would only become the latest to choke away an opportunity to win a trophy.

Elliott hails from Dawsonville, not Atlanta, but the logic used here only further vindicated the suffering long endured by sports fans of all kinds in the Peach State.

Of course, we all know how that turned out.

The driver of the #9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet took the lead away from fellow title contender Joey Logano with 43 laps remaining in the 312-lap race around the four-turn, 1.022-mile (1.645-kilometer) oval in Avondale, Arizona and led all 43 of those laps to capture his first title.

And look what has happened since then.

Along with the rest of the fanbase, Elliott, a huge Braves fan himself, got to watch the Braves rally from a 52-55 record at the start of August to win the NL East at 88-73.

Fittingly, they won their NLDS matchup against the Milwaukee Brewers, 3-1. They then took another 3-1 lead over the Dodgers, again in the NLCS, and again, the Dodgers won Game 5. But this time around, the Braves won Game 6 to clinch their first World Series berth since 1999.

They hadn’t won the World Series since October 1995 — the month before Elliott was born — but they ended that drought as well. They went up 3-1 (because of course they did) over the AL champion Houston Astros, again dropped Game 5, and again won Game 6.

Elliott may not hail from Atlanta, but that doesn’t seem to matter. The Georgia “curse” is over, and it ended last November with him — not last week with the Braves.

While we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, the potential exists for much, much more in this respect.

Elliott is back in the Championship 4 and has a chance to win his second straight title at Phoenix Raceway this Sunday, and WynnBET lists him as the second favorite to pull it off at +250.

No driver has won back-to-back championships since Jimmie Johnson won the second of five consecutive titles in 2007. Johnson, like Elliott in 2020, was a first-time champion for Hendrick Motorsports in 2006.

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Additionally, the Bulldogs, another team of which Elliott is a huge fan, find themselves listed as the overwhelming favorites to win this year’s college football title at -110. They are comfortably ranked #1 in the country, thanks in large part to their suffocating defensive unit. They have not won it all since 1980.

They may have to beat Alabama (ranked #2) twice to do it (once in the SEC Championship Game, once in the College Football Playoff), but doing so would only further solidify the end of this drought.

But first, tune in to NBC this afternoon at 3:00 p.m. ET for the live broadcast of the NASCAR Cup Series Championship 4 race from Phoenix Raceway. Will Elliott hold off teammate Kyle Larson and Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. to win his second title? Start your free trial of FuboTV today!