DALLAS — For the first time in their Georgia careers, Malaki Starks and Mykel Williams enter the season where the Bulldogs aren’t defending national champions.
The two talented juniors arrived on campus just after the Bulldogs won it all in 2021. The following season, Georgia went 15-0, capturing back-to-back national titles.
The Bulldogs won their first 12 games of the 2023 season, before at last falling to Alabama in the SEC championship. It was the first time that Williams and Starks tasted defeat in their college careers.
Yet that loss or lack of a championship hasn’t changed anything inside the Georgia football program. The team still attacks the day the same, regardless of what happened in the previous season.
“We’ve always been the chaser,” Williams said. “The mindset is still the same. The standard is the standard and we know what we want to accomplish. We’re going to put in the work to accomplish what we want to accomplish.”
Because of players like Starks and Williams, Georgia enters the 2024 season as one of the top teams. The Bulldogs will be a popular preseason pick to not just win the SEC, but possibly the College Football Playoff as well.
Of course, winning the SEC does not always beget a national championship. The Bulldogs won their first national championship after losing to Alabama in the 2021 SEC Championship Game. And with no SEC East this season, winning the SEC will be even more difficult.
Conversely, making the College Football Playoff should be easier for a team like Georgia. Had a 12-team College Football Playoff existed a season ago, Georgia still would’ve made the field as the No. 6 overall seed.
But the past season and all its success, and lone failure, mean nothing to this new group of Bulldogs.
“Whether we go 0-12, which I don’t think will happen, the year before or a national championship,” Georgia quarterback Carson Beck said. “Whether we drop one, that motivation that we have is separate from the last and separate from the next. I think we’re always super focused on where we are at now. Take it day by day.”
Georgia became the first team since the College Football Playoff began to win back-to-back national titles. No team has three-peated since Minnesota in the 1930s. The loss to Alabama last season ended Georgia’s chances of equaling that feat.
Georgia will get another crack at Alabama, as the two teams meet on Sept. 28. The Bulldogs though aren’t planning some grand revenge tour or putting any extra emphasis on that game or the much-anticipated game against Texas.
The Bulldogs plan on taking things one game and one day at a time. This team knows what that process looks like and understands it can help Georgia achieve its goals.
“We don’t have a chip on our shoulder in terms of people trying to use that as motivation,” Smart said. “I’ve never used a failure from the previous year as motivation and never used the success of a previous year as motivation; we won’t do that this year. That’s not who we are.
“We want to recreate ourselves to stay in the best light we can. This team has been fun to coach. I tell people all the time we had 15 really tough spring practices, and that includes the spring game. I probably would only trade one of those in and say could I do it over. We got a lot out of those.”
Georgia knows talking about winning a national championship is cheap. It’s much harder to win one. Starks, Williams and Beck know what that’s like because they’ve done it before.
And these Georgia players aren’t using past success to drive them. Just as they aren’t dwelling on a previous defeat to fuel a championship run.
“We don’t talk about it, we win them,” Starks said of national championships. “That’s the biggest thing for us right now. Keeping our head down and keeping the standard the standard. I think the goal every year is to raise the standard and that’s just football.”
