Much will be made about the recent visit of 5-star quarterback Arch Manning. The No. 1 overall prospect in the country for the 2023 recruiting cycle was in Athens this past weekend as he made his official visit to Georgia. The Bulldogs and Texas are seen as the front-runners to land the talented quarterback prospect.
Yet even beyond potentially adding Manning to the Georgia program, head coach Kirby Smart still loves the state of his quarterback room. In a recent interview on the Paul Finebaum show, Smart gushed about the long-term outlook in the room.
“Well, at the best programs, you’ve got good quarterback rooms, and we’ve got a really good quarterback room,” Smart said. “You know, we’ve got three guys and an incoming freshman that we think are talented.
“I was just so proud of Brock (Vandagriff) and Carson (Beck) at how much better they got. I can’t wait to see the 29 practices they get leading up to the first game to continue to grow.”
Entering the 2021 season, Georgia will carry four quarterbacks on its roster. Beck and Vandagriff battled it out for the back-up quarterback job during spring practice, with the elder Beck looking slightly better than the redshirt freshman Vandagriff. Georgia also signed 4-star quarterback Gunner Stockton in the 2022 recruiting cycle, and he too was able to go through spring practice.
Of course, Georgia does return a championship-winning quarterback in Stetson Bennett. He elected to return to Georgia for his final year of eligibility in 2022 and is clearly cemented as the starter.
Bennett made significant strides in year two under offensive coordinator Todd Monken, as the quarterback threw for 29 touchdowns in 12 starts a season ago. Both return this season and Bennett gets the added benefit of actually being the No. 1 quarterback for Georgia.
Something that was not the case last spring of August.
“He’s grown and gotten better. This is a guy that didn’t get these reps,” Smart said. “You think of a national championship quarterback — ‘Oh, he got all the reps last spring.’ He didn’t. He wasn’t the guy. He was third-string last spring. So, some of these are his first time getting reps. And he’s also very comfortable in coach Monken’s offense, which is going to give us a chance to be more successful.”
Related: What Kirby Smart, Todd Monken contracts say about the direction of Georgia football
Georgia will need its offense to improve this season, even after ranking in the top-10 in points per game and plays of 20-yards and 30-yards. The defense figures to take a step back after seeing five defenders taken in the first round of the 2022 NFL Draft, which didn’t include All-American Nakobe Dean. Georgia will also have new defensive coordinators in Glenn Schumann and Will Muschamp, as Dan Lanning is now the head coach at Oregon.
Still, the continuity on offense with Bennett, a host of skill players and Monken puts this offense in a position to be one of the best in college football. That’s something we haven’t always been able to say about Georgia under Smart.
Georgia will get its first chance to showcase its new offense against Lanning, as the Bulldogs and Ducks play on Sept. 3 in Atlanta.
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