Nowadays you typically have to throw the ball at a high level to win the National Championship.

Once you reach the playoffs, most teams are extremely hard to run the ball against. Everyone is loaded up with blue chip defensive linemen and savvy linebackers, it's why they won their conference (or came close) and made it this far in the first place.

Beating these teams, who have elite personnel and weeks to study your run game, requires a high level, pro-style passing attack (dropback, progression passing ideally from 11 personnel). There's only so much a defense can do against a great drop back passing game from the spread, the perfect throw beats good coverage.

There were two teams in college football this season with a Championship caliber, pro-style passing attack.

One of them went down in Michigan under snowfall, pass-rush, and quarters coverage. The other is on the other side of the playoff bracket from the Wolverines. The Cincinnati Bearcats are actually close but are likely missing the rarest and most difficult ingredient to a top shelf pro-style passing attack...a high caliber offensive tackle play.

Alabama is the one remaining pro-style passing team with the sort of trump card firepower to feel great about navigating the playoff bracket.

Georgia? They do two things very well which tends to excite college football punditry but doesn’t win Championships. They run the ball pretty well and are extremely difficult to run against.

Alabama probably takes this thing for the same reason they overcame Georgia in the SEC Championship. The Bulldogs’ abundance of massive, athletic defensive tackles and blazing fast linebackers couldn’t stop Bryce Young from throwing the ball down the field to Jameson Williams.

Michigan doesn't have the right personnel to win a Championship, but they don't have to worry about being an exception to the rule just yet. First they need to figure out how to beat Georgia without having a future first round draft pick quarterback or high level passing game.

[BREAKING DOWN THE GEORGIA MATCHUP AFTER THE JUMP]

Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs

Georgia under Kirby Smart has been terrific at nailing all the sorts of things which look impressive in the regular season but face diminishing returns in the playoffs. They have a pretty run-centric offense and while they stack 5-star talents across the offensive depth chart just as they do on defense, they clearly emphasize physical blocking in the inside zone/duo run game amongst their blue chips.

Here’s a picture of their offensive front:

Left tackle: Jamaree Salyer. 6-foot-4, 310 pounds. .9956 5-star from Georgia.

Left guard: Justin Shaffer. 6-foot-4, 330 pounds. .8828 3-star from Alabama.

Center: Sedrick Van Pran. 6-foot-3, 310 pounds. .9713 4-star from Louisiana.

Right guard: Warren Ericson. 6-foot-4, 305 pounds. .9070 4-star from Georgia.

Right tackle: Warren McClendon. 6-foot-4, 320 pounds. .9131 4-star from Georgia

Tight end: Brock Bowers. 6-foot-4, 230 pounds. .9532 4-star from California.

They aren’t as massive as you might think from their reputation, what they do well in Athens is recruit athleticism across the line and then teach these guys to get under pads and drive defensive fronts off the ball. Their best team prior to this one, the 2017 crew which lost the National Championship in overtime, had current New England left tackle Isaiah Wynn (6-foot-2, 311 pounds) at left tackle.

Georgia’s passing game hinges on the threat of their run game. They couldn’t really run the ball on Alabama and everything depended on former walk-on and current starting quarterback Stetson Bennett. He’s a good athlete with a live arm but he and their passing game aren’t up for executing high level, spread passing against a good defense. Alabama’s pressures got to them and Bennett threw a pair of picks, one of them for an Alabama touchdown.

Michigan is pretty well suited to defending them since they can put Daxton Hill on Georgia’s top receiver (tight end Brock Bowers) and then give the box and run game some extra attention. The Wolverines have quietly held up phenomenally well outside at cornerback this year and might as well count on doing so again vs the Georgia outside receivers.

They also have an advantage on the edges. Georgia’s left tackle Salyer is a great player but Alabama gave the Dawgs some troubles on the right side against Warren McClendon. Michigan’s unique advantage relative to the rest of college football is having star Edge rushers on either side of the D-line in Aidan Hutchinson and David Ojabo.

Of coure the biggest concern for Michigan in this game isn’t stopping Dawg points, it’s scoring any of their own.

What made Georgia the no. 1 ranked team for most of the season was this defensive front:

Defensive end: Travon Walker. 6-foot-5, 290 pounds. .9901 5-star from Georgia.

Nose tackle: Jordan Davis. 6-foot-6, 330 pounds. .8858 3-star from North Carolina.

Defensive end: Devonte Wyatt. 6-foot-3, 315 pounds. .9067 4-star from Georgia/KS JUCO.

Outside linebacker: Revolving door of 5-stars Nolan Smith, Adam Anderson, and Robert Beal.

Inside linebacker: Quay Walker. 6-foot-2, 240 pounds. .9830 4-star from Georgia.

Inside linebacker: Nakobe Dean. 6-foot-0, 220 pounds. .9908 5-star from Mississippi.

While he’s the lowest rated player, Jordan Davis is the most freakish and problematic piece to the puzzle. If you single block him he’ll drive an offensive lineman into the backfield and inflict havoc. If you double him, Devonte Wyatt can cause similar issues. If you double them both everyone else is running wild.

The most fearsome component though is their zone blitz packages in which Davis will slant and stunt across gaps and get replaced by one or both of Quay Walker and Nakobe Dean on inside blitzes.

Georgia will rush the passer in groups of four and have six different defenders with three sacks or more on the year. It’s not a team who will just whip you with a pure Edge like Michigan often does, their simulated/creeper blitzes are the name of the game.

Here’s one of their favorite concepts:

That’s 290-pound Travon Walker dropping into coverage as the end and 330-pound Jordan Davis going from nose to outside contain. This front is wild because these guys are true athletes.

Quay Walker will blitz first across the center’s face and then blazing fast Nakobe Dean will cross into the next A-gap or wherever he finds space. Dean had five sacks on the year and 20 quarterback hurries largely because of this concept.

It’s difficult to run the ball against them between their size and athleticism and then their capacity for inflicting negative plays in the blitz game. They spend much of their time just stacking linemen with their big front while their linebackers run to the ball and eliminate any real gains on the ground.

They can be victimized by the same biological issues confronting all massive humans, the oxygen demands of maintaining high level effort with huge muscles, but unless Michigan is ready to be an up-tempo team it won't matter.

The secondary is good, although Alabama chewed them up. They had to import Derion Kendrick from Clemson through the portal when their blue chip recruiting couldn’t replace all their departing starters from a year ago. Kendrick is solid but not an island corner. Smart coaches up defensive backs pretty well but they aren’t nearly as fearsome on the back end as they are up front.

How can Michigan defeat Georgia?

The main challenge of the game is this, Michigan was the Big Teniest Big 10 team this season, winning with physical play in the trenches and a brute squad powering the way for the run game, which makes them exactly the sort of squad Georgia is designed to beat.

The Bulldogs love for teams to try and square up to them in the trenches because no one has the same number of powerful athletes up front as they have accumulated through class after class of top five recruiting.

The obvious answer for Michigan is to win this game by trying to attack the Georgia secondary and move the focal point of the game away from their vaunted front. Michigan State baited the Wolverines into doing exactly this and while Cade McNamara dealt some damage, he couldn’t bring them down.

But what if Georgia isn’t better than Michigan up front?

What if Michigan has the guards, tight ends, and running backs to pound away at the Dawgs and find some points?

No one can think that Michigan is likely to be particularly efficient on offense attempting their power run game against Georgia, but how efficient do they need to be? 

You don’t have to outrun the bear, just the other campers. In this case, the other camper is Georgia’s offense trying to score against the Michigan defense.

At their best, Michigan mixes run and pass until they’ve worn an opponent down and can just run them over. Ultimately they want the outcome of this game to come down to the play of their O-line, Hassan Haskins, and Blake Corum against the Dawg front. If this comes down to whether Andrew Vastardis can pick up the blitz, McNamara can find windows in coverage, and Cornelius Johnson can get open it’s a shaky bet.

If Michigan can run the ball on Georgia, they stand to come out ahead in a struggle over which offense makes the least disastrous mistakes. Especially if the officials don’t overturn any obvious sack-strips.

So how can Michigan run on Georgia?

It’s tricky. Running between the tackles faces obvious perils while getting the ball to the wide edge is also a challenge. Big Travon Walker lines up to the wide side of the field setting hard edges or forcing wide angles Nakobe Dean can run down. Big Quay Walker aligns to the tight end and will blow up lead blocks (also to help set up Dean) and safety Lewis Cine also gets involved in a hurry from the boundary hash and is second on the team in tackles.

What I’d look for is Michigan to align in formations that allow them to run at Georgia’s speed and away from their power. Georgia aligns to make you beat their D-line or heavier Mike linebacker (Walker) in order to get to Nakobe Dean, but if you can? You just might be in business. They’re not really counting on facing someone like Zac Zinter who can pull around the edge and effectively seal inside one of their star outside linebackers. Like on a play such as this…

…running counter and other weakside power schemes running at Dean’s side of the field. For this play you get a double on big Jordan Davis, Ryan Hayes has a down block on Devonte Wyatt, Zac Zinter needs to pull and connect on whichever outside linebacker is on the field, and the tight end gets a chance at Nakobe Dean or else needs to clean up whatever he finds while trusting Haskins or Corum to make a guy miss and pick something up.

Michigan will also need to focus on popping those D-linemen with the right combinations to prioritize getting Haskins and Corum past the first level of the defense.

At some level of this game, the Wolverines have to trust their own to be better. You can’t run in terror from the Georgia defensive front and ask Cade McNamara and the receiving corps to win the game, you need to find some matchups you can live with and hope Ryan Hayes can angle block a tackle, that Zinter and Trevor Keegan can pull and hit their marks, and that your star running backs can break tackles or make people miss.

If Michigan can hold up against Georgia's own downhill run scheme and then win the battle of which quarterback best protects the ball between Cade McNamara (plus J.J. McCarthy in the inevitable package) vs Stetson Bennett? They win this game in the same manner they managed all their other victories this season.

Then they can worry about the challenge of beating a high level passing team who's linebackers actually know what they're doing.