For the first time in the 2025 season, Tennessee fans will have a chance to change the game. The Volunteers will host Georgia on Saturday afternoon looking for their first win in the rivalry since 2016. A rocking Neyland Stadium has helped Tennessee snap losing streaks in recent years against teams like Alabama and Florida.
Georgia and Kirby Smart are no strangers to hostile environments, but this time
they’ll have to do it with a quarterback that will be making his first ever true road start. Gunner Stockton already has big-game experience, but walking into perhaps the loudest stadium in the country is going to give him a different challenge.
“Loud affects your offense,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said. “It affects your ability to communicate. You know, the communication goes down the line a lot of times, and you’ve got to talk all the way out, and there’s communication between parts of the offense that have to happen, and loud most certainly affects that. And Neyland’s one of the loudest.”
Georgia handled things fairly easily back in 2023 with Carson Beck in Knoxville. An early scare was quickly erased as the Bulldogs toppled the Joe Milton led Volunteers. A similar situation played out in 2021 with Stetson Bennett running the show.
Now it’s Stockton’s turn, without the added benefit of having several weeks to get comfortable and find a groove. The oddly early timing of this game is another wrinkle this week, which has to benefit Tennessee as Georgia has yet to leave Athens yet this season.
“We played in some loud places last year, and it affected communication,” Smart continued. “So you have to be smart. When you game plan, you can’t maybe do quite as much as you can do at home. You just have to be smart about what you ask guys to communicate and say because it can be frustrating.
“Loud is loud — at some point it’s deafening, but they have an extremely loud environment, and we’ve got to push through it. There’s nothing you can do about that. What you can do is focus on your task during the week so that you don’t have to question what you’re doing in that environment.”
Gambling markets are certainly expecting that noise to affect the game on Saturday. Tennessee remains a 3.5 point underdog as of Wednesday morning, with that number crashing down from over seven last weekend.
Kickoff is set for 3:30 p.m. ET on Saturday. ABC will have the call.
