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Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
A decorated athlete comes up short of winning a title, he makes the stunning decision to take his talents to South Beach for a new chapter in his career and he instantly becomes someone that seemingly everyone outside of his new fanbase is rooting against.
Did I just describe LeBron James or Carson Beck?
(Somewhere, a Georgia fan just punched a hole in the wall after reading that lede.)
Beck might not have been anywhere nearly as decorated as James was by the time he left Cleveland for Miami in 2010, but both spurned proud fanbases who then took joy in any of their future shortcomings. That was evident based on the response after Beck and girlfriend Hanna Cavinder reportedly had multiple luxury vehicles stolen from their home in Miami. Let’s just say the overwhelming comments to that story weren’t exactly rich with sympathy (and definitely not empathy). They were more like, as one Georgia fan texted me upon seeing the news, “even his cars are getting intercepted.”
Say what you will about others taking joy in someone getting robbed of their 6-figure possessions. What’s become abundantly clear is that Beck, like James, has entered his “villain” era. If there’s a top villain of the 2025 college football season, Beck already has that title wrapped up.
The irony is that at this time 2 years ago, Beck was being praised for “staying at a school the old-fashioned way” instead of hitting the portal as a 3-year backup. Things can change in a hurry. Like, in a few weeks, Beck went from being the 2024 preseason Heisman Trophy favorite to the guy who couldn’t stop throwing interceptions. Eventually, he stopped throwing interceptions and he ended his time at UGA with 131 consecutive passes without a pick, which was the longest stretch of his career. Of course, the jokes will still be in play whenever — hypothetically speaking — he gets a vehicle stolen.
That’s something to remember here. Beck will be viewed as a villain by more than Georgia fans, plenty of whom don’t care about the specifics of how or why he left after his season-ending injury in the SEC Championship. The college athlete with Lamborghini and private jet NIL deals is now the most scrutinized person in the sport. Add in the famous girlfriend and yeah, Beck is now about as relatable to the common fan as a trust-fund kid who owns an island.
The reported 7-figure pursuit of Beck following his disappointing season portrayed a sense of entitlement that the previous era of college football never dealt with. If this were 2004, Beck would’ve likely stuck with his NFL decision and dealt with a steeper climb at the next level as a result of his letdown of a pre-Draft season. It’s not 2004, though. It’s an era in which market value is in the eye of the beholder, and much to the frustration of fans, they aren’t the beholder.
Beck would have a different public perception if he had gone to a place like Oregon, which has become the gold standard for maximizing the potential of veteran portal quarterbacks like Bo Nix and Dillon Gabriel. Anyone would’ve looked at a move like that and pointed to the football-focused upside. Georgia fans wouldn’t have been happy, but Beck probably wouldn’t have been public enemy No. 1 nationally. If anything, passing on an opportunity to follow Cavinder to Miami would’ve earned Beck some approval points in the court of public opinion.
That’s not what he did, and ultimately, he made that decision knowing that it would be met with its fair share of eye rolls. The irony is that Beck, if you can get past the cars and famous girlfriend, made the same football decision that Cam Ward did. Ward decided to go back on his NFL declaration and transferred to play in the Shannon Dawson-led Miami offense. All that did was turn Ward into a likely top-3 pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. Beck, in his ideal world, can check every box that Ward did while checking the additional box of getting Miami to the College Football Playoff.
And if Miami meets Georgia in the Playoff? That’d be a clash unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this era of the sport.
Who wouldn’t want to see that? That would be the 2013 Zach Mettenberger LSU-Georgia reunion on steroids. It would be a few notches above Trevor Etienne’s reunion with Florida after crossing enemy lines last year and facing his former team in Jacksonville.
Beck, a Jacksonville native, can relate to Etienne. Once upon a time, Beck admitted to First Coast News that he named Florida a leader in his recruitment in hopes that it would yield an offer from rival Georgia. It did. The rest is history. That might not have told us that Beck was dead-set on becoming a villain, but it did tell us that he was someone who had no problem leveraging the system to get what he wanted.
Beck did that again, albeit with much different context.
In 2025, Beck will have the eyes of the college football world on him. He put himself in that position. It’s in the eye of the beholder whether Beck is in this position for more positive reasons than negative reasons. Either way, his status as a villain was confirmed by the reaction to his first newsworthy moment in his new digs.
If Beck has more than cars intercepted at Miami, that’ll make the rounds, too.
Connor O’Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He’s a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
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