It all happened so fast.

Deanna Bowers still remembers her son Brock's final year at home in Napa, California. The Covid-19 pandemic forced Bowers to work out at local parks, all leading up to his senior season being canceled. As the year wore on, Deanna Bowers saw her son drift into a rough place mentally.

As he made the late decision to enroll early at Georgia, Bowers only wanted a chance to play. Three years later, he's departing Athens and heading to the NFL as arguably the greatest tight end in college football history.

"It’s just, I mean, surreal," Deanna Bowers said.

As you might expect, Deanna Bowers didn't expect her son's career to go exactly the way it did.

After all, youth football in California, especially the northern part of the state, isn't what it is in other areas of the country. Bowers didn't begin playing until fifth grade. Even during high school, Bowers didn't face nearly the same competition as his future teammates.

"We were playing Petaluma (High School) which is not SEC," Deanna Bowers said. "He’s going straight from a place that’s, we have great football players that come out of the valley. We have a handful of them, but really not like what you guys see down there. So going to the SEC was like, well, you may redshirt, and that’s OK. We just didn’t know what was going to happen."

Of course, what happened is a freshman season of epic proportions.

Bowers caught 56 passes for 882 yards and 13 touchdowns. He scored touchdowns in both of Georgia's College Football Playoff victories. His 13 scoring receptions set a new Georgia record.

At the end of it all, Bowers had a national title that validated his reasons for coming to Georgia in the first place.

"Every coach we talked to all over—Washington, Notre Dame, everybody—says, ‘We have a good shot to win a national title.’ Everybody says that," Deanna Bowers said. "Brock did a lot of independent research on his own. He’s on the Google. I think he realized that Georgia did have Jordan (Davis) coming back, Jalen (Carter), Nakobe (Dean). They were in a real good position."

Bowers backed up his freshman season with another stellar campaign in 2022. He won the Mackey Award as the nation's best tight end, becoming the first Georgia player to do so. Bowers also ended the season with another national championship, catching a touchdown pass in the blowout win over TCU.

All that can change a person's life. Deanna Bowers saw that with her son firsthand when he came home in May 2023 and was asked to throw out the first pitch at a local baseball tournament.

"We went up there and he goes, ‘Mom, can you just stay with me until I go out on the field? Just stay by me,'" Deanna Bowers recalled. "I’m like, that’s weird. Warren (Bowers, Brock's father) was like, 'Gosh, what? You’re 20.' He was worried that there would be too many kids or adults that would overwhelm him. He’s a kid. But those incidents are when I realized, yeah, OK, his life has changed a little bit."

Bowers' fame is transcendent in the state of Georgia as well. He is the biggest name on a team full of stars.

That legend of Bowers carries over to the retail side of things as well. During the Christmas season, a friend sent Deanna Bowers a picture of a candle emblazoned with "Smells like Brock Bowers." Local sporting goods stores sell cups with a likeness of Bowers on the side.

The normally reserved Bowers makes sure to accommodate every request he can. Every child who approaches him walks away with an autograph or picture.

But the fame hasn't affected Bowers. Far from developing a big head, Bowers sticks close with his poker club buddies in Athens. Back home, he runs with the same group of friends he's had since seventh grade.

"Just over Christmas break, there were four of them in my house. They’re on their knees, because if they were on their feet they would trash my living room, but they’re playing football on their knees," Deanna Bowers said. "He’s right in it with them. They don’t treat him any differently. On their knees, two on two in the living room."

Is Bowers as good of a football player on his knees as he is on his feet?

"They were picking on him, he was trying to defend. It wasn’t going well," Deanna Bowers said.

Those moments of fun over Christmas came at the end of an extremely frustrating couple of months for Bowers.

In Georgia's game against Vanderbilt on October 14, Bowers went down in the first half. He clutched his left ankle, came off the field, and didn't return.

A subsequent diagnosis revealed a high ankle sprain. Bowers underwent the tightrope ankle procedure in Birmingham on October 16 to stabilize the ankle.

That journey didn't come without its hassles, thanks to Bowers' fame. Bowers, his parents, and Georgia associate athletic trainer Chris Blaszka entered the hospital through a back entrance.

After the surgery, Bowers felt hungry and wanted to stop at Chick-Fil-A. Even that didn't go smoothly.

"Chris kind of did a lap around the Chick-Fil-A," Deanna Bowers said. "He was like, 'Well, I just kind of want to make sure it wasn’t too crowded before we bring him in there.' I was like, what?"

The surgery kicked off a grueling three-plus weeks of rehab for Bowers.

His mother stayed with him for nearly a week, putting fresh ice on his ankle every three hours. Bowers spent the majority of every day rehabbing with the Georgia trainers, who updated his parents and his surgeon via daily group texts.

After multiple injuries earlier in his football career, Bowers knew how to go through a rehab process. That and his work ethic had him progressing at a superhuman rate, as his parents and some friends saw the day before Georgia's game against Missouri on November 4.

"They invited us into the facility to watch him work out," Deanna Bowers said. "Hartley was there. His best friend Jackson from high school was like, ‘He doesn’t look like he had surgery two weeks ago,’ or whatever it was at that time. He literally was running routes. They weren’t beating him into the ground; but he was moving really well."

Deanna said Brock actually hit all the benchmarks for his return before the Missouri game. But the doctors felt it would be best to give him another week, pushing his return to the Ole Miss game on Nov. 11.

Where did the work ethic that produced the fast return come from?

"I think that was a direct result of our California lockdowns," Deanna said. "He was so, you just don’t know what you have until it’s taken away from you. So I think for his entire college career, he knew that at any point, somebody or anything could happen. It could be taken away."

Bowers played 45 snaps against Ole Miss. He caught three passes for 34 yards and a touchdown in what turned out to be his final game in Sanford Stadium.

Against Tennessee the next week, Bowers had his leg rolled up on. That hampered him that day, as well as in the next two games against Georgia Tech and then Alabama in the SEC Championship Game.

"Things were being said that weren’t exactly, like the announcers saying, 'Oh, he’s playing on one leg, him and Ladd (McConkey). No," Deanna Bowers said. "He wasn’t as fast and he wasn’t as good as he was against Ole Miss, but he wasn’t as bad as it was made out. I think that was frustrating to him, because he worked really hard—hours of rehab with Chris. To have people say him and Ladd should have been sitting, I don’t know. It’s water under the bridge now."

The loss to Alabama devastated Bowers and his teammates. Within 24 hours, they went from the undefeated No. 1 team in the country to No. 6 and playing in the Orange Bowl against Florida State.

Nobody said it out loud, according to Deanna Bowers. But given the state of Bowers' ankle and leg, it became pretty clear immediately that Bowers wouldn't be playing against the Seminoles.

The focus then turned to the decision of whether or not to head to the NFL.

It might seem like a clear-cut case for a player who will likely be chosen within the draft's top 10 picks. But the choice proved to be harder on Bowers than you might think.

Bowers loves his teammates. Passing up another year with them weighed heavily into the decision-making. The age-old adage of the grass not always being greener on the other side also came up.

Ultimately, the advice of Georgia's coaches played a role in convincing Bowers that the NFL is the next and best step in his career at this point.

"Brock obviously got a clear message that, hey, you’re projected here. I think Kirby does a good job of this," Deanna Bowers said. "Your draft stock is here. You can come back, but we advise you, and look at the tight end room. You’ve got Oscar (Delp). You’ve got Lawson (Luckie). You’ve got Pearce (Spurlin). You’ve got the two studs coming in as freshmen. Those guys reload. They just reload. Frankly, I told Mary Delp, I said, ‘Thank goodness your kid’s four and mine’s 19, because if they were close in numbers, it’d be really hard to tell them apart.'"

Bowers is now off to the NFL. But his legacy in Athens is written in stone.

The career numbers are gaudy, sure: 175 receptions, 2,538 yards, and 26 touchdowns. Those numbers rank him third, fifth, and second all-time at Georgia among pass-catchers.

But his mark on the program extends off the field as well.

Kirby Smart has mentioned multiple times that one of Bowers' main legacies will be in the example he set for the other tight ends. His work ethic has set a standard among that group that will be passed down from Delp to Luckie and Spurlin, then to incoming freshmen Jaden Reddell and Colton Heinrich, and on down the line.

After once wondering how her son would adjust to the SEC, Deanna Bowers marveled at the outpouring of love and support from Georgia fans after Bowers declared for the draft on Tuesday night.

"It’s amazing, just the sheer love that the fans have for him, and that he in turn also has for them," Deanna Bowers said. "Who thought as a little kid you’d be playing in front of almost 100,000 people week in, week out? I think he really appreciates the fact that people did come out and watch games at that volume. They cared so much about what he was doing on the field and with his teammates. I just think that, when I read all that, we weren’t a super churchgoing family. But I just kept it simple. I said, hey, both my kids, you better treat other people the way you want to be treated. That’s how you’ve got to live your life."

Predictably, Bowers has never gotten too wrapped up in his own accolades.

He didn't come to college with the expressed goal of winning the Mackey Award. After being named a finalist for the Lombardi Award this year, he gave his mother the plaque and told her to take it home.

So what is Bowers most proud of, if not himself? Look no further than a box in California.

"He liked those national titles, I’ll tell you that," Deanna Bowers said. "He’s very proud of those two, those rings that he’s got at home. I think the rings, when he brought the rings home and showed us the SEC ring and the national ring and the Peach Bowl, those were the ones I think he’s most proud of."