LOS ANGELES — It will take some getting used to for Southeastern Conference football fans to see Georgia as a real life powerhouse rather than a metaphor for missed opportunities and squandered prosperity, a reputation the Bulldogs have earned the hard way.

No matter how many All-Americans or No. 1 draft picks rolled through Athens over the years, the image of Georgia football for much of the past four decades has been something akin to the royal family of a former world power, maintaining the stuffy façade of significance amidst declining institutional ambition and importance.

But finally, it seems that Georgia’s status as a chronic underachiever is about to end.

The Bulldogs are entering the College Football Playoff as SEC champions for the first time since Urban Meyer and Nick Saban began to rule the league in the mid-2000s, and regardless of what happens from here, it feels more like a turning point than a one-off.

A program that has all the natural advantages to win at the highest level probably is about to do just that, and perhaps for several years to come as a national title contender.

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Which is really how it should be when you consider that Georgia — which faces Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1 — has just as many resources as Alabama, Ohio State, Texas and Southern California but for some reason has yet to turn them into a sustained run of dominance.

“If people think this is the last time it’s going to be like this, they’re sadly mistaken,” Georgia defensive end Lorenzo Carter said.

Saying Georgia has as much business winning national titles as the legacy programs is controversial, particularly around the SEC, because the Bulldogs simply don’t have the same historical resumé as their peers. That’s completely fair, if you believe past is prologue.

Since winning the national championship on the shoulders of an all-time running back named Herschel Walker in 1980 — Georgia’s first and only real sniff of the promised land in the modern era — seven programs within a 350-mile radius of Athens, Ga., have accounted for 15 national championships, including all of Georgia’s hated and historical rivals.

Notably, some of those titles were won by stars who grew up close to the Georgia campus but wound up in bordering states such as Cam Newton and Deshaun Watson, a source of endless frustration for Bulldogs fans who have been excluded from the joy felt by Auburn and Clemson in ending a championship drought.

But there are two reasons why Georgia’s time is coming, and in fact, might already be upon us.

The first, quite simply, is that the state of Georgia is producing good football players at an unprecedented level, the product of a population boom in the Metro Atlanta area over the past 25 years and an investment at the high school level that has brought better coaching and improved academic support for college eligibility.

A recent study by The Advocate (Baton Rouge, La.) showed that Georgia produced 1,240 signees to Power Five schools in the last decade, fourth behind Texas (2,036), Florida (1,874) and California (1,641) in raw numbers but by far the highest in the country per capita.

And the quality is there along with the quantity. Georgia had 41 four- or five-star players on the 247 Sports composite rankings for the 2018 class, 33 in the 2017 class, 27 in the 2016 class and 32 in the 2015 class.

“You always mentioned it when you talked about Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, but all of the sudden No. 1 through 20 in Georgia might be better than any other state out there,” said Erik Richards, an Atlanta resident and the national recruiting director for the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. “You look at Gwinnett County (in the Northeast suburbs of Atlanta) alone, it’s become a breeding ground for probably the most competitive high school football I’ve seen in the country and I fly all over the country. I see the Mater Dei (in Southern California) and Bishop Gorman (in Las Vegas) and so on, but I don’t know top to bottom that there’s a more talented region than the football being played in Gwinnett County.”

Much of that is rooted in sheer numbers — Metro Atlanta growing from 2.9 million people in 1990 to nearly 6 million today in an area where football already was popular — but there are other factors as well.

Richards said the HOPE scholarship program in Georgia, which was created in 1993, helped recruit high school coaches (including from neighboring Florida) with the promise of funding their own children’s college education. In addition, he said, many of the suburban public schools in Atlanta have developed booster clubs that run annual budgets of more than $250,000 to help fund things such as coaching and facilities.

“You don’t hear amounts like that outside of Texas,” he said.

And while it’s never a guarantee all the great players from Georgia will end up as Bulldogs — especially with every school in the SEC and ACC recruiting hard in the state as well as many Big Ten schools trying to plant a flag in Atlanta — it’s certainly a leg up for Kirby Smart, whom Georgia hired two years ago largely because of his ties to the school and the state.

“The one thing Kirby has over most coaches taking over a program is the fact he played here, his dad was a high school coach here, he knows the high school coaches, he recruited the area when he was at Alabama,” said former Georgia coach Jim Donnan, who coached Smart his final three seasons as a player. “If you’re Georgia saying, hey, what do we have to do to beat Alabama? Facilities, coaching, players, whatever it’s going to take, well now we’ve got one of their coaches who’s a graduate of this school so he knows the roadmap.”

Which leads us to the second, and perhaps more nuanced factor in Georgia becoming a football power: It simply decided to be one.

That’s not something very many programs can snap their fingers and decide. Even if Boston College or Oregon State or Mississippi State hired the best coach it could possibly hire and built the best facilities in the country, there are natural limitations in place that work against those schools acquiring enough talent to consistently compete for national championships.

Georgia never had those limitations. In fact, you could argue the Bulldogs had so many advantages whether it was their talent-rich location, loyal fan base or the reputation of Athens as one of the nation’s coolest college towns that the administration never really tried as hard as it should have.

When the SEC changed from a regional league into the biggest brand name in college sports, an evolution fueled by unprecedented money and pressure to win national championships in football, Georgia essentially made the decision to stay above the fray — admirably, in some ways, naïvely in others.

Georgia’s policies on marijuana infractions and other behavioral issues, for instance, were notoriously more stringent than its SEC competitors (and still are, in many ways, though some off-field problems in the past year have been handled in a more in-house manner). There was also a lingering facilities problem until this year when Georgia’s $30 million indoor complex opened, something the school was almost stubborn about not doing during the Mark Richt era.

Just imagine: Until this season, the Bulldogs sometimes had to take hour-long bus rides to practice at the Atlanta Falcons’ facility if the weather was bad.

“I told Kirby the other day, I promised you we'd have a new indoor building and place to dress down there, but I didn't realize it was going to be 20 years later,” Donnan joked. “A lot of times when you’re here for a long time, you don’t realize what everybody else has.”

Georgia discovering that institutional will to compete at the same time the state is exploding with players and SEC East rivals Tennessee and Florida are rebuilding doesn’t necessarily guarantee the Bulldogs a long run of championship contention. But it certainly gives them a chance, especially if they can string together a few more days like last Wednesday when Smart signed six five-star recruits and the top-rated class in the early period.

“Before the season, I felt like if you’re going to get some of Georgia, you better get it this year because the way he was recruiting, it looked like it was ready to go,” Donnan said. “It may be a year early."

For those who've had to wait years for Georgia to shed its sleeping giant reputation, it wouldn’t be a moment too soon.