ATHENS, Ga. — Kirby Smart sat on a golf cart Saturday night in a darkened hallway outside a room where the Georgia coach was supposed to hold his postgame news conference. Smart was holding up his news conference, however, watching the end of Vanderbilt’s upset of Alabama. The assembled media members didn’t mind, as they were watching it, too.
A week before, Smart and his Georgia team had been at the center of the college football universe. On Saturday night, they were largely out of the spotlight, slogging out a 31-13 win over struggling Auburn. It lacked style points but looked a whole lot better in comparison to other results around the SEC:
• Alabama’s loss.
• Tennessee’s loss at Arkansas.
• Missouri being routed at Texas A&M.
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Ah, yes, Georgia has a loss. The Bulldogs have not been impressive, including Saturday, and they could be headed for another loss in two weeks at soon-to-be-No. 1 Texas.
But those looking for perfection this season are missing the point. Georgia tailback Trevor Etienne, on the other hand, very much had the right point when asked how long it had taken him to get over the loss at Alabama.
“You can’t let it affect you, especially with this new 12-team Playoff,” Etienne said.
This is a new era. The 12-team College Football Playoff leaves teams some margin for error and rewards teams at their best at the end of the season. According to Austin Mock’s latest projections, Georgia is tied for fourth with Penn State for the best chance of getting in the field at 81 percent.
Georgia, with as talented a roster as it has, has as good a chance as anybody to be that team come December. Whatever its seed, however many regular-season losses it absorbs, a reasonably healthy Georgia would be the team nobody wants to face.
Smart and his staff don’t need to reach for many examples. Last year’s Georgia team, undefeated in the regular season before falling flat in the SEC Championship Game, missed the four-team Playoff but would have made a 12-team field and would have been dangerous. So might have Smart’s team in 2018.
Offensive coordinator Mike Bobo could point to the 2007 team, which many considered one of the best teams in the country by the end of the season, but it didn’t make what was then just a two-team Playoff. Then there was the 2012 Georgia team that came 5 yards short in the SEC championship.
A lot has changed since Bobo’s son, Drew, then 2 years old, was the ringbearer at Kirby and Mary Beth Smart’s wedding in 2006. For one thing, Drew Bobo is now Georgia’s center, making his starting debut Saturday. The BCS championship is long gone. The four-team Playoff is gone. It’s a different day, and like it or not, a two-loss or even three-loss team can make the CFP, and if it plays really good ball, it can still win it all. Smart seems to understand this and has been preparing his team for it, mentally as much as physically.
“It’s a consistency of performance, and when you ride the wave of emotion, you get caught in the bottom of the wave,” Smart said. “We’re just trying to do this. We’re just trying to get better and keep getting better.”
But let’s be clear: Georgia has to get a lot better.
The offense gets more attention because that’s the unit in charge of scoring points. So far this season, it has been on the maddening side. On Saturday, it finally started fast, scoring a touchdown on its first drive, something it had yet to do in the first two drives against an FBS opponent. But after looking like it found something at Alabama in an aggressive, downfield passing attack, the offense used a more efficient approach, with more methodical drives, against Auburn.
Boring, but effective: Georgia had eight drives, with touchdowns on four of them and a field goal on another, plus no turnovers.
“Everyone thinks attack, they think deep shots, deep balls,” quarterback Carson Beck said. “But I think our offense attacked today, whether that was with the inside zone, mid zone, power or play-action pass or short game or screen. There’s so many ways you can attack a defense, and when you’re just moving the ball downfield, and you start converting on third down, you start to wear a defense down, and then ultimately next thing you know, you’re in the end zone, and it’s been 13 plays. The defense is defeated.”
One of those methodical drives came when Auburn climbed within 14-10 in the third quarter. Georgia responded with a 12-play, 75-yard drive for a touchdown. The game was never again within one possession.
“That was closer to our offense that we had last year, where when we get punched on defense, they respond,” Smart said.
The problem is Georgia’s defense is being punched a bit more. Alabama did it plenty in the first half last week. Auburn didn’t do it as spectacularly but enough to arouse concern: running the ball effectively at times, hitting on some explosive pass plays and not turning it over after entering the game minus-11 in turnover margin.
The tackling issues are uncharacteristic for a Smart defense, although Smart shrugged that off. After leaving Thursday’s practice thinking his team was bad at tackling, he turned on the Atlanta Falcons-Tampa Bay Buccaneers game and saw bad tackling.
“It’s indicative of the culture of football that people don’t tackle, people don’t hit, people don’t practice like they used to, including us,” he said.
The bigger issue was a lack of swarm to the ball. Missing open-field tackles will happen, but the more bodies around the ball, the less it matters, and on too many runs to the edges Saturday, and the week before, Georgia didn’t have that swarm.
Or as Smart put it: “You’ve gotta do what you call sometimes open a can of whoop ass. We didn’t do that.”
The morning after the loss to Alabama, Smart sent a text to Nick Saban. “The sun’s still coming up,” Smart wrote, an ode to what Saban always told Smart and his assistants before games.
“You’ve got a great team,” Saban wrote back, according to Smart. “They play really hard, and they should be proud of the way they played. And keep getting better.”
And getting better is all it’s about. Get better, win enough games to make it to the Playoff and be the team that nobody wants to play. Yes, getting a first-round bye would be ideal, and that’s not off the table for Georgia, but with the trips to Texas and Ole Miss and with Tennessee coming to Athens, it’s going to be hard. The flip side is that the schedule makes 10-2 or even 9-3 something that could be enough to do the job.
Etienne was asked if this creates an NFL-like mentality, where the idea is to just win games like Saturday, rather than try to rack up style points.
“Definitely,” Etienne said. “Everybody wants to go undefeated. But it definitely gives you some leeway. It wasn’t our goal to get a loss, but that loss doesn’t end our season. We still have the goals in mind we had entering the season.”
(Top photo of Dillon Bell, left, and Carson Beck: Dale Zanine / Imagn Images)
