Brock Bowers for Heisman? How about a spot on Georgia football's Mount Rushmore?
The rousing reception for Brock Bowers as he walked off the field last Saturday from Georgia football fans in the corner of Jordan-Hare Stadium that remained to celebrate will stick with his father Warren.
UGA president Jere Morehead was there to offer a handshake for the conquering hero who added to his growing legendary status in his third Bulldog season by making big catch after big catch in the fourth quarter in a 27-20 win over Auburn.
“That was something as a parent, I don’t think I’ll ever forget,” said Warren Bowers, who was in the crowd.
Where will the story go from here for the kid from 2,500-plus miles away in Napa, Calif. who became one of the pillars of a program that’s in its latest glory days with two national championships he helped bring and is working on a third?
The junior tight end’s name is now in the conversation as a possible Heisman Trophy finalist a year after quarterback Stetson Bennett got an invitation to New York and finished fourth in voting.
Catch him while you can.
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Chances are Bowers has just three more games in Sanford Stadium to go before he declares for the 2024 NFL draft, including Saturday night’s clash with No. 20 Kentucky.
Bowers is a projected first-round draft pick, possibly a top 10 overall selection. Shoot, if he was draft-eligible, Bowers looked ready to go after his freshman season in 2021.
“Obviously, the body looks better now then it did two years ago, but he had an NFL frame,” said Jim Nagy, a former scout and now executive director of the Senior Bowl who saw Bowers early in his career in Athens. “He looked the part even as a freshman and a lot of guys don’t.”
How will Bowers be viewed when he comes back in 2031 or 2032 for the 10th anniversary of those national championship teams? OK, he may have a conflict with his team’s NFL schedule. So maybe 2041 or 2042 for the 20th.
The way Bowers has played the last two weeks — 8 catches for 157 yards and a touchdown against Auburn, a game after 9 catches for 121 yards and two touchdowns against UAB — that followed All-American honors in both 2021 and 2022, it’s worth wondering Bowers place in Georgia football history.
Would he be on the Mount Rushmore of Georgia greats?
There with the likes of Heisman Trophy winning running back Herschel Walker, College Football Hall of Famer Charley Trippi, three-time All-American defensive end David Pollack and two-time national championship quarterback Stetson Bennett?
“It’s pretty amazing for the name to be thrown around in those type of situations,” Warren Bowers said.
Loran Smith, a UGA athletics historian who has authored 18 books, including one on the 2021 season with coach Kirby Smart, mentioned Trippi, Heisman winner Frank Sinkwich and Walker as on that Georgia Mount Rushmore. But, he said, it would be hard to leave out Terry Hoage and Scott Woerner from the 1980 national championship defense or Pollack or Champ Bailey or Bill Stanfill.
“If you evaluate players at being the best at their position, he’s got to be the greatest tight end we’ve ever had,” Smith said of Bowers. “He’s a game-breaker. … It would be hard not to include Brock Bowers, but if you pin me down, I don’t know who I’d go with. I do think he would get consideration. The other thing is who has been more valuable to his team than Brock Bowers? I don’t see any player has ever been more valuable to his team than Brock Bowers.”
Smith said it’s hard to compare eras. He mentioned Jimmy Orr, who had only 16 catches at Georgia in 1957, but went on to be 1958 NFL rookie of the year and caught touchdown passes from Johnny Unitas and Bobby Layne.
For the record, the Bowers family never took a summer vacation to Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is within a day’s drive from Utah State where Bowers’ mother DeAnna was an Al-American softball pitcher and Warren an all-conference center on the football team.
The Bowers family was busy with travel teams in the summer. Sister Brianna played soccer and softball.
“We’d take one week a year and go down to Disneyland and spent it with family,” Warren Bowers said. “We went to Hawaii once and Mexico twice.”
Warren Bowers did drive past Mount Rushmore in the middle of the night about 10 years ago, he said, for some fly fishing in Little Bighorn in Montana and pheasant hunting north of Sioux Falls, S.D.
Kentucky coach Mark Stoops had to turn on tape of Saturday’s game against Auburn and see Bowers make one-handed catches on back-to-back plays (the second was wiped out by a penalty) and then blow past Auburn’s defense on a 40-yard catch-and-run touchdown from Carson Beck with 2:52 to put Georgia ahead for good.
“It didn’t have to be me,” Bowers said. “I was just going out there doing my job, doing my thing and Carson ended up finding me a couple of times.”
A week earlier, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound Bowers was shaking off UAB would-be tacklers in a game he had 110 yards after the catch. His father described it as Bowers “hit the air brakes and let those guys smash into one another and kept going.”
Bowers wasn’t even a top 100 recruit out of high school but hit the weights and trained hard with personal trainer John Cortese when his 2020 season was scrapped due to the pandemic.
“Absolute freak,” Stoops said. “I mean that in the most complimentary way. … He plays well without the football. He plays well with the football. He’s a team guy and you can tell that’s a great guy to work around right there. He steps up when they need him to."
Nagy, who was at Georgia’s game at Auburn Saturday, said the gap between Bowers and the next tight end in the 2024 draft is wider than the top prospect at any other position.
“He’s the total package in terms of his skill set,” Nagy said.
While 2021 No. 4 overall pick Kyle Pitts of the Falcons is a dynamic pass catcher, Bowers has a “good level of blocking ability there,” with his frame and toughness, Nagy said.
“He’s more than willing to go across the middle and make contested catches,” he said. “He’s drawing everyone’s attention this year and he’s able to beat that and still make plays, make contested plays. Not afraid to get hit… and he can run with it. He’s got run after catch instincts, such natural hands and he transitions easily. He can kind of get his around and peak and see who’s coming and make that first guy miss consistently. He’s a unique player and they’ve used him in a lot of unique ways.”
Bowers can play with his hand in the dirt like a prototypical tight end.
He can line up outside like a wide receiver.
He can play out of the backfield like when he took a handoff on a third-and-2 and ran for a first down last week. He’s a threat on a jet sweep. Bowers has 172 rushing yards and five touchdowns on 16 career carries.
“Who can argue that there’s a better football player anywhere in the country? Just football player,” Smart said. “The guy has the greatest toughness and grit that I’ve been around. He’ll do whatever you ask him to do for this team. I’ve got a lot of respect for that guy as a competitor.”
Bowers is playing like he’ll be the first two-time winner of the Mackey Award for nation’s top tight end.
Stoops was at Arizona when future Pro Football Hall of Famer in Rob Gronkowski played there.
“This guy is something I haven’t seen before,” he said
Bowers leads Georgia with 30 catches for 413 yards and 3 touchdowns, on track for topping the team in receptions for the third straight season. He’d be the first to do that since Terrence Edwards led Georgia in catches from 1999-2002.
Edwards may not hold onto his touchdown catch record of 30 over four seasons. Bowers is now at 23 after tying A.J. Green for second place all-time. Bowers has 149 career catches for 2,237 yards and has work to do if he’s to catch Edwards with 204 catches for 3,093 yards.
“#19 You can have all my records,” Edwards posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “You are insanely good.”
Bowers’ father said he thinks his son could be in the Heisman conversation.
“You have to look at the number of touches, the outcome of your opportunities which you’re presented,” he said. “That should be a part of it in the value of your team. There have been a lot of quarterbacks that haven’t gone on to win national titles that have won the Heisman. They were just the best player on their team by the fact they got the ball every time.”
Beck says Bowers going up one-on-one with a linebacker “in a body like that, that’s not really a cover guy, we consider that a mismatch.”
Smart lavished praise on Bowers for something that won’t show up in the record books—his blocking.
“Most underrated part of his game,” he said. “Just turn off the catches and go watch this dude block. Because he tries to — he tries to put them in the ground. He has an extreme amount of power in his core and he centers. He gets his feet on people and runs his feet and he's a really powerful weapon as a blocker, too.”
Bowers will play his 36th game in a Georgia uniform against Kentucky. Smart and his staff are maximizing every snap they can get with him.
Asked why highly-regarded freshmen Lawson Luckie and Pearce Spurlin didn’t get in against Auburn, Smart was to the point: “Ya'll want to take Brock Bowers out and put one of them in? Anyone voting on that?”
Probably not. If Bowers is on the sideline, he can’t show us something we haven’t seen from him before.
“I think he does something every day that surprises me,” offensive guard Tate Ratledge said. “He’s got that it factor.”
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: 'Absolute freak' Brock Bowers keeps delivering for Georgia football
