SAD NEWS : Georgia Bulldogs Running back Kendall Milton reportedly confirmed dead in a fatal car crash 😢
Running back Kendall Milton excited to suit up for Georgia one more time
He’s battled injuries freshman year, sophomore year, junior year and even this year,” McGee said of Milton. “Just to have the mental capacity to keep pushing speaks tremendously of his character and his drive.
… He’s done a great job of getting himself back, and he’s played very well down the stretch for us. He’s almost healthy. He’s still wearing a knee brace, his hamstrings are taped up, so it’s not like he’s 100%. But he’s pushing through, and that’s the life of a running back in our league.”
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Now holding a degree from Georgia, Milton still has NFL aspirations. While that might’ve seemed a foregone conclusion when he signed with the Bulldogs as a 5-star recruiting prospect in 2020, it’s less of a certainty after injuries forced Milton to miss 12 of 40 games and big chunks of several other games his first three seasons.
But Milton has managed to stay on the field a lot more this season. He missed only one game – Alabama-Birmingham in Week 4 – and is expected to get the start Saturday against FSU in the Orange Bowl (4 p.m., ESPN). He enters the game as the Bulldogs’ second-leading rusher (686 yards) and leading scorer (12 TDs).
“I feel like right now I’m just kind of having fun with it, being like a kid again and having fun with it,” Milton said. “I had one thing earlier in the year that I’ve been dealing with from the whole injury aspect. It’s hard to play your game when you have a lot of thoughts in the back of your mind about (getting hurt again). There’s a lot of second-guessing going on. Once I was able to eliminate those doubts, I was able to just play my game.”
Four years later, Milton is only now playing the way everyone expected when he came to Georgia as an early enrollee. A 6-foot-1, 220-pound athlete, he’s been able to run inside with power and outside with speed. He recorded a career-high 156 yards, including a 51-yard run, against Georgia Tech in the final game of the regular season and had 127 yards and two TDs two weeks earlier against Ole Miss.
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Milton was averaging 11.25 yards per carry in the three games leading into the SEC Championship game. But Alabama was able to shut down the Bulldogs’ run game, and he finished with only 42 yards on 13 carries. Once again, though, he was Georgia’s leading scorer, with two TDs. Nine of his team-leading 12 have come in the past four games.
For some fans, that might seem like too little, too late. With 1,735 career yards and only four starts entering what likely will be his final game as a Bulldog, that’s far below the expectations that came from California with Milton.
But for him, he wouldn’t change a thing.
“It’s been amazing, just being able to embrace the Georgia culture and embrace the legacy that other players have left behind,” Milton said. “I still talked to James Cook and Kenny McIntosh. Sony (Michel) comes back all the time, Nick (Chubb), Todd (Gurley). Being part of a legacy like that is a blessing.”
