OXFORD, Miss. — A phrase stood out as Georgia players spoke Saturday night after a resounding 28-10 loss at Ole Miss. There was safety Malaki Starks, relaying what Kirby Smart had told the team:
“Don’t come out and point fingers, we don’t need to point fingers, just look yourself in the mirror and realize what you’ve got to do better.”
Next up was nose tackle Nazir Stackhouse.
“We’re not a pointing fingers-type team,” Stackhouse said. “We know some guys have struggled, but that’s why we’re a team. We keep each other up, and we’ve got each’s other back.”
Well, good news: Nobody on this Georgia team is playing well enough to deserve to point fingers at anyone else.
What is the one thing that this team is very good at? What is the thing that you can count on it being good at in any game, no matter what? Well, other than the punter and the place kicker, who are both booting it very well. The fact they are inarguably the best things about this team right now says enough.
Blame the offense, as many Georgia fans do, and for ample reasons: the lack of a run game, the absence of explosive plays, the offensive line that isn’t getting any better, the quarterback who appears to have regressed.
Blame the defense, which had Ole Miss pinned against its goal line — thanks to a punt from team MVP Brett Thorson — and then proceeded to let the Rebels complete a 16-yard slant pass that the whole building knew was coming. Or the defense that, after the offense showed some life early in the second half, allowed Ole Miss to drive back down the field to make it a two-possession game again.
There’s complementary football. This was compliment-less football.
That’s been Georgia almost all season. The closest it has come to a complete game on both sides of the ball was the Oct. 19 win at Texas, with the season-opening win against Clemson a close second, though the latter did include a slow start by the offense. Otherwise, the season has been a mish-mash of consistency, with sparks of greatness on both sides and frustrating stretches on both sides. Entering this weekend, Georgia ranked seventh in the SEC in offensive yards per play, and sixth in defensive yards per play. Not great in either.
Some of that can be attributed the schedule. Georgia has now played four teams ranked in the College Football Playoff selection committee’s first Top 25, and all of them won on Saturday. It has played four road games, three starting at night and the fourth (Ole Miss) under the lights for most of the second half. That’s the kind of schedule that magnifies flaws.
But the flaws are being quite magnified.
The offensive line, an expected strength, has been a liability. The unit is banged up, especially at guard, but the tackles have not been good.
The wide receivers and tight ends are what they’ve always been: no game changers but no bums either, good enough as a group to win with but lately prone to ill-timed drops.
Quarterback Carson Beck hasn’t been consistent, but he also hasn’t had much of a run game to lean on. And yes, offensive coordinator Mike Bobo can call plays better.
An observation: Georgia’s offense feature a lot of pre-snap movement on Saturday, a lot of moments where guys were pointing at each other to the right place. Consider the sequence near the end of the first half, when the offense should have been running quicker plays to try to get points but ended up taking way too much time between plays, then punting anyway.
It may be time to simplify things. Smart talks all the time about how much the staff puts on Beck as far as checking in and out of plays at the line, protections, motions, etc. Maybe it’s time to play free and easy. Quit trying to outwit the defense and just outplay them. You’re Georgia, you should still have the talent to do that.
The defense needs to take that approach, too. There’s way too much talent on this unit to look as helpless as it has at times, especially Saturday. Find a way to play with more swagger.
Here’s the thing: This season isn’t as dire as it may seem. It just doesn’t measure up to past years. So it’s understandable that fans and outsiders would wonder if this just isn’t a good Georgia team. But recent years’ teams didn’t have two things:
- This hard a schedule.
- This much margin for error.
Smart is in his ninth year as Georgia’s coach, and this is only the third time in that span that the Bulldogs have lost two games in the regular season. The first two times (2016, 2020), the second loss meant the Playoff hopes were over. This time Georgia is still Playoff-viable and still has a chance at an SEC championship, down but very far from out.
“It’s a different world,” Smart said. “We’re not riding this roller coaster wave of emotion. We’re on a long journey. It’s a long journey, and you got to play the next play, you got to play the next game, because that’s the goal. That’s why I told the players: Guys, our future’s in front of us. We’ve got to figure out how to get better.”
Figuring that out this late into the season is the issue. It may be that this just isn’t a good enough team, with too many flaws on both sides of the ball.
It could also mean there’s still upside for this team. Georgia has recruited top-three recruiting classes and supplemented them in the portal, and the head coach has two rings. If this team gets in the Playoff, and the chances of that are still good (69 percent, per Austin Mock’s projections), it will be the team nobody wants to face.
But this team is also nine games in, and at this point it’s fair to wonder whether we should just believe what we’ve seen it to be so far: flawed on offense, inconsistent on defense, just not very good overall.
Maybe it’s time to lower expectations. Then be ready to be surprised.
“Man, I don’t even know how to explain it,” Starks said. “I guess it is a different world, college football the way it’s set up. The teams that handle that the best will move on, and at the end of the day we’re just trying to be one of those.”
(Photo: Justin Ford / Getty Images)
