OXFORD, Ms. — For years, Georgia was the bully in college football. On Saturday, it was the one who got pummeled.
The Bulldogs lost 28-10 to Ole Miss in a game that didn’t feel as close as the final score indicated.
It’s undoubtedly a tough result for a proud program. It’s the kind of result that would force Georgia to look long and hard about the way it does things.
But that’s no longer the day-and-age the sport lives in. The loss doesn’t end the season for Georgia.
It just makes next week’s game against Tennessee all the more important.
“Welcome to the SEC, baby,” Smart said. “I mean, I said when the season started that it was going to be the toughest schedule we’ve ever had in the SEC with the addition of the Texas game on top of all the others we had to play. It’s extremely tough. It’s difficult. I mean, the outlook of going to those four road games, the Kentucky, the Texas, the Alabama, and this one, we knew it was going to be really tough.
“And as you go through the season you get injuries. I mean, they’ve got injuries too. Everybody’s got injuries. It just makes it tough. It’s tough, but you know what, our future’s in front of us. We’ve got a big game next week. We’ve got to go out, and we’ve got to find a way to execute at a higher level.”
Georgia has now played four teams ranked in this week’s College Football Playoff rankings. The Bulldogs have gone 2-2 in those games, with none of them being played in Athens.
That changes next week, when Georgia welcomes No. 7 Tennessee to Athens. It’s now a must-win game, with the Bulldogs no longer having any margin of error.
The Bulldogs will likely drop from the No. 3 spot in the rankings down to the edge of the top-12. The Volunteers picked up a 33-14 win over Mississippi State this weekend and will very likely carry a top-10 ranking into Saturday’s game.
A week after getting embarrassed, Georgia is going to have to clean itself up and ready for another fight.
“Our league is extremely tough, a lot of parity,” Smart said.”Anybody can beat anybody. I honestly believe that, and how you prepare each week defines your team. We could be looking at, I don’t know, it’s going to be interesting the way this thing plays out. I told people it’s not going to surprise me if every team in the league ends up with two losses just because it’s that way. It’s tough.”
Ole Miss’ defense smothered the Georgia offense on Saturday. The Bulldogs had a season-low 10 points and turned the ball over three times. Now it will face a Tennessee defense that is even better in terms of scoring defense and yards per play allowed.
But Georgia will find itself in a scenario that Ole Miss did on Saturday. The Rebels had to win or their season is over. A third loss would’ve ended any hope for a College Football Playoff berth.
Ole Miss came out like the more desperate team, the meaner team and the hungrier team. It walked away with perhaps the biggest win in Lane Kiffin’s career.
Georgia has played in bigger games than next week will be for Tennessee. But for someone like Carson Beck, who struggled once again on Saturday, a home game against Tennessee will be a defining game in his time at Georgia.
“With the outcome of tonight, we can’t go back and change it,” Beck said. “It is what it is and, well, guess what? Being in the SEC means next week we’re, I mean, we’ve got a big game, you know, so we’re going to put this to bed and give ourselves 24 hours. Go lock in tomorrow and see what, you know, we did wrong, go watch the film and then we’re moving on to Tennessee because we’ve got a really big week next week.”
There wasn’t one area where Georgia excelled on Saturday. It got outplayed on offense, defense and special teams.
That means there’s plenty to improve on for Georgia. And they’re going to need to improve quickly.
Smart talks often about the need to always be getting better. Georgia has not been doing that in the weeks since the win over Texas. It found itself in a four-quarter fight against Florida.
It got knocked out cold on Saturday by Ole Miss. Can Georgia get up and fight its way back into the championship conversation?
We’ll find out next week in Sanford Stadium.
“We got to be better, and we got to execute better,” safety Malaki Starks said. “And don’t point fingers, you don’t need to point fingers. Look yourself in the mirror and realize what you got to do better. But I think that’s something that we all can do, and that we got to go back to work on Monday.”
