Sports are more or less a random outcome generator. This is especially true for college football, which combines a small sample size with the difficulties inherent in motivating 18- to 22- year-olds to do anything. As someone who works with college students for a living, It’s incredible to me that even the worst football coach can get 85 scholarship athletes plus walk-ons onto the field at the same time. That anybody has ever won a college football game is a miracle on par with the loaves and fishes.
Anyway, no matter what forecasters like ESPN’s FPI or Vegas sportsbooks say, sometimes the better team, even a vastly superior one, loses.
Nevertheless, despite the randomness inherent in sports, we imbue them with narratives. On Saturdays (and sometimes Thursdays or Tuesdays, if your tastes are expansive enough to appreciate MACtion) in the fall, the game itself is governed by physics and a certain amount of chance. All the recruiting, practice, and preparation turn into four blissful, stressful hours of semi-organized calamity in which some questions get answered and new ones emerge.
Then, we come up with stories to explain the results of the game. We decide who Can’t Win the Big One (should be familiar to us as Georgia fans), who’s Soft, who’s Overrated, and so on. If you’ll permit a riff on the famous Joan Didion axiom, we tell ourselves these stories in order to fight. There’s only so much football in a week, and you have to fill the lonely hours with some kind of noise.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the narratives likely to follow the 2025 edition of the Georgia Bulldogs.
Questions at Quarterback
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Georgia’s quarterback situation is a question mark. At least, that’s what a fair amount of the preseason coverage has focused on. Quarterback development has been the most consistent criticism of the Kirby Smart-era Bulldogs, and that’s unlikely to change with Gunner Stockton taking over full-time for Carson Beck this year.
Still, we thought quarterback would be a strength of last year’s team. Then someone forgot to renew Beck’s subscription, and the team spent most of the year trying to get by with the free trial version. He threw multiple interceptions four times, getting a full hat trick thrice, and generally looked lost and uncomfortable. Despite his incredible regression, Georgia still won three of the four games in which he had multiple picks, only losing a close road game to Alabama when Beck added a disastrously timed fumble to the interception platter.
Looking around the league, very few teams have much clarity at quarterback either. Here’s how I’d break them down (note that Stockton is absent from the list below):
Tier 1 — This tier includes starters who are returning to their teams and played well in at least one season without injury concerns.
Garrett Nussmeier, LSU; LaNorris Sellers, South Carolina; Marcel Reed, Texas A&M; Diego Pavia, Vanderbilt (somehow!)
Tier 2 — This level includes highly touted transfers or new starters as well as returning starters with injury concerns.
Arch Manning, Texas; Austin Simmons, Ole Miss; DJ Lagway, Florida; Taylen Green, Arkansas; John Mateer, Oklahoma
Tier 3 — This level indicates transfers with a shakier track record or less proven prospects.
Jackson Arnold, Auburn; Blake Shapen, Mississippi State; Beau Pribula, Missouri; Ty Simpson, Alabama; Joey Aguilar, Tennessee
Tier 4 — Better than no quarterback at all!
Zach Calzada, Kentucky
You can quibble with these rankings (that’s what rankings are for), but my overall point is that only four teams return a strong starter. Of those four, Vanderbilt isn’t a serious contender for the conference title, and both SC and A&M would probably need some luck to get to Atlanta. Only LSU seems like a legitimate contender, and they’ll have to deal with having Brian Kelly at the helm.
Around the country, most teams with playoff aspirations are facing a similar situation. Of the top 10 in the preseason AP poll, only Penn State and Clemson are returning starters at quarterback. So, this season is as wide-open as any in recent memory.
“It all comes down to quarterback play” is surface-level analysis, but it’s true. And based both on precedent and the state of the rest of the conference, UGA should be well-served by even average quarterback play.
The Offense More Generally
Kirby Smart is a defensively minded head coach, and his teams are always going to prioritize stout defense and ball-control offense. In an era of uptempo, fast-paced, pass-heavy offenses, the Georgia style of play is always going to draw criticism for being old-fashioned and/or boring. I myself am no stranger to such complaints.
Some of these complaints fall on coaching. A core part of Georgia fandom is complaining about Mike Bobo’s offense, especially after what felt like a breakthrough under Todd Monken. Let’s take a quick look at Georgia’s offensive points per game in each of the last five seasons:
2020 (Monken’s first year): 32.2, fourth in the SEC
2021: 38.6, third in the SEC
2022: 41.1, third in the SEC
2023 (Return of Bobo): 40.1 PPG second in the SEC
2024: 31.6 PPG, 5th in the SEC
So, something definitely happened last year; the offense’s production was lower by a full touchdown per game than at any other point this decade. Whether that’s the fault of the offensive coordinator or Beck’s regression is difficult to sort out. Either way, Beck is gone, and the quarterback’s development is on Bobo as well, so the responsibility for sorting things out is his alone.
Of course, you know that Georgia has only produced a 1,000-yard receiver once in school history when Terrence Edwards did it in 2002 since hearing that fact on a broadcast is as much a fall tradition as a pumpkin on the porch. Hopefully, the arrival of Zachariah Branch will have a bigger impact there than did Dominic Lovett.
Potentially more alarming is that the offense hasn’t had a 1,000-yard rusher since D’Andre Swift in 2019. That statistic is at least partially attributable to the robust RB rotation the offense employs. But UGA finished 14th in the conference in total rushing yards last year, ahead of only Mississippi State and LSU. That’s a year after the Dawgs led the league in total rushing yards.
Ultimately, the issue with last year’s offense was very likely due to the offensive line, which was plagued by injuries and never really gelled. So, while I love yelling “FIRE BOBO!” at my TV every time the offense doesn’t score as much as anyone, continuity is an underrated commodity in coaching. If Searels and Bobo can solve the line problems, the offense is primed for a rebound. But you can expect to hear about the deficiencies on that side of the ball early and often, and their job security will be in question if the offense doesn’t roll.
You’re Only King Once
The criminally underrated indie pop band Beulah, who have an Athens connection through the Elephant 6 collective despite being from San Francisco, released their swansong Yoko in 2003. That’s not a reference to John Lennon’s widow — it’s an anagram for the phrase that serves as the header to this section.
When Georgia beat Alabama in January of 2022 to win its first national championship in 41 years, I poured a glass of scotch and drank it while contentedly looking out the window into a frigid Chicago night. That night kicked off a 29-game win streak that included an SEC championship and another national title. The national conversation surrounding the team was that Kelee Ringo’s pick-six signaled the moment the baton passed from Saban to Smart.
Of course, the Good Ship Georgia Dynasty took on some water in the 2023 SECCG, a game that Georgia probably should’ve won but didn’t. The last two seasons, both won by Big 10 programs, have launched a thousand articles about the end of SEC supremacy. Even within the conference, some folks seem ready to crown a new king ($$). No matter that Texas lost both games it played to UGA last year — it appears that the Smart era is already past its prime.
College football loves a dynasty, but it loves novelty just as much. Everyone outside the Georgia faithful would love nothing more than to see the Classic City Canines’ day in the sun come to an end.
Will Georgia win it all again this year? Well, a deeply flawed team managed to win college football’s deepest and most competitive conference last year. Jalon Walker, Mykel Williams, and Malaki Starks won’t be easy to replace, but you can still expect the defense to be the stronger side of the ball. Preventing regression there and solving the offensive issues is key to carrying a playoff run deeper into January.
The expectation, both of Butts-Mehre and the fanbase, is that Georgia will be playing meaningful football come the new year. All the conversations surrounding the team add up to one larger point: If Georgia doesn’t compete for a conference title and/or misses the playoff, you can expect the same kind of gravedancing that followed Clemson’s slippage.
Still, there’s nobody I’d rather have on the sideline to figure these issues out than Kirby Smart. As a wise man once said, “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
Go Dawgs!
