While Georgia fell short on having any offensive players make first team All-SEC this past preseason, the Dogs make up over 1/3 of the All-SEC team on defense, and former Alabama grad assistant, Glenn Schumann, returns for his second season as defensive coordinator. Schumann is an exciting young name in the coaching ranks, but, on the other hand, the Dogs also dropped to the 23rd overall scoring defense in 2024 after being a top-five unit each of the three seasons prior to that.
Still, it’s a Kirby
Smart defense, and that’s the closest remnants of the early Alabama Nick Saban defenses left in college football, so there’s always going to be some formidable defensive play here. The season is still young, and while they gave up all of 13 points to Marshall and Austin Peay, they also gave up 38 (before overtime) to Tennessee two weeks ago in a not-so-great showing in their first real test of the season, getting shredded through the air to the tune of 371 passing yards and 4 TDs from the Vols.
The Dogs still run Kirby Smart’s old 3-4 scheme, with three big defensive tackles playing a 2-gap mush up the middle, with a wide linebacker that will rush the QB as the lone edge rusher. For the most part, pass rush pressure comes from well-timed blitzes, rather than individual pass rushers. The secondary plays mostly a quarters zone scheme that can allow some underneath yards on crossing routes and drags, but prevent shots from getting over their head and can break quickly to swarm on shorter sideline routes.
Up front, defensive tackle Christen Miller is one of the most impressive individual run defenders in college football. He’ll single-handedly stand up guards or centers and shed them whichever way he needs to stuff interior runs by himself. His running mate at nose tackle, Jordan Hall, is more of a quiet space eater on the inside, and Gabe Harris occupies the hybrid DT/DE role (what Alabama calls the “Bandit”).
The heart of the defense, though, are the linebackers. CJ Allen was one of the leading backers last year and returns as the center man in the defense. Allen is probably UGA’s best all-around player on the entire team, and already has an astounding 12 run stops on the season. He’s flanked by another veteran, Raylen Wilson, who’s built like a semi-truck and hits like one, too. Wilson was one of UGA’s best blitzing linebackers a year ago, racking up 7 tackles for loss.
Quintavious Johnson plays the true “Jack” linebacker role where he lines up basically as a pass rushing defensive lineman, but has yet to make much of an impact on the stat sheet. On the other hand, the younger Chris Cole is playing something of a swiss-army knife linebacker that’s doing some rotational edge rushing as well as some more traditional linebacker play, and he’s getting more and more play time and leads the team in sacks. He’s a former 5-star recruit who will likely start getting plenty of 2027 draft talk before the season is over.
At defensive back, star safety KJ Bolden, cornerback Daylen Everette, and nickel Joenel Aguaro all return. Bolden was a prize recruit a little while back and had a fairly impressive freshman campaign last year, even if Ryan Williams stole his lunch money early on. Everette’s also going into his 3rd year starting and 4th season playing regular snaps for the Dogs and has been a steady player for them the entire time, as has Aguaro. The new face to the secondary, cornerback Daniel Harris, has proven to be the weak link of the group, giving up 97 yards and 2 TDs so far this season.
This is, overall, a defense that looks to be excellent against the run and has some impressive open field tackling ability and punishing hits in the secondary. However, they also lack any teeth in the pass rush without sending overload blitzes, and they often struggle with coverage across the middle, as their bigger linebackers can get asked to cover too much space.
Alabama hasn’t been able to get much going in the run game yet this year, and don’t expect that to change in this game. I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if the Tide ends up with under 75 rushing yards on the day. However, in the passing game, I think this is a fairly favorable matchup for Alabama. The Tide’s tackles have really struggled with speedy edge rushers, but UGA’s insistence on running a 3-4 front means that the mammoth Kadyn Proctor will usually be playing power against power, rather than power against speed, and that’s something I think he’ll do much better at. If the Alabama OL keeps Ty Simpson clean, then I think he can fairly efficiently dice UGA’s secondary over the middle for much of the game.
The two issues will be: can the Tide hit explosive plays, or will Simpson have to play patient and nearly perfect every drive? And then, of course, does Road Bama (TM) rear its ugly head and the offense falls to pieces with false starts, penalties, and missing easy blitz pickups? If that happens, it’s game over.
I think Simpson easily puts up over 300 passing yards on the Dogs. The question will be how many mistakes get made in the process? Until proven otherwise, I think there will be a few too many to overcome, and the Alabama offense stalls out enough times to keep them at 28 points.
