Kirby Smart’s Dawgs are a consensus pick for the 2024 College Football Playoff.
But to win a third national championship in the past four years, Georgia is going to have to play the equivalent of two playoffs.
First, the No. 1-ranked Bulldogs have to get through their regular schedule, which looks sort of like a mini-playoff, with a season opener in Atlanta against No. 14 Clemson, and road games against the Associated Press poll’s No. 4, No. 5 and No. 6 teams (Texas, Alabama and Ole Miss). UGA also plays host to No. 15 Tennessee in Athens fairly late in the season.
And, of course, it’s never wise to overlook the “rivalry” games against Auburn (Homecoming), Florida and Georgia Tech. (Games against Tennessee Tech, Kentucky, Mississippi State and UMass have only the most paranoid Bulldogs fans concerned.)
In a total flip from last season, when the college football world declared the Dawgs as the beneficiary of one of the nation’s easier schedules, this year it’s a given that they have one of the toughest. And, on top of that, it’s a new era in college football. We have an expanded, 12-team College Football Playoff, major conference realignment as the SEC, Big 10, Big 12 and ACC all have added teams (while the Pac 12 has all but disappeared), and more transfer players than ever, thanks to the portal and name, image and likeness deals.
Looking at the 2024 schedule, UGA is a 13.5-point favorite over Clemson in the renamed Aflac Kickoff Game at noon Aug. 31 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and might end up favored in all of its games. But Bama still is expected to be Bama, despite the retirement of Nick Saban and the loss of some talent to the portal, and beating the Crimson Tide, especially in Tuscaloosa, is one of the tougher tasks any Georgia football team faces. A trip to Austin also looks challenging, since Texas, in its first year in the SEC, has veteran quarterback Quinn Ewers and four returning starters on the offensive line. And while Lane Kiffin’s transfer portal-remade Ole Miss team might be a bit overrated in the preseason, that’s likely to be another challenging road game.
The month of November, in particular, looks tricky for the Dawgs. While Florida isn’t expected to be that good, the game in Jacksonville can be unpredictable, and the Dawgs then must make the trip to Oxford the very next week, followed by a return home to face the Vols. That’s during a time of the season when injuries traditionally become a factor.
And yet fan-base confidence is high. My brother Tim, who thinks Georgia will go undefeated, offered these thoughts on the Dawgs’ big road games: “Texas plays Oklahoma the week before Georgia. Win or lose, Texas will be drained. Dawgs win. Georgia is off the week before Bama. Kirby has an excellent record with extra prep time and Saban has said he’s concerned about Bama’s D. Advantage: Georgia. And Kiffin finds ways to lose big games.”
Added my grand-nephew, Gabe Rudd: “These Dawgs are ready to play and they’re going to go all the way. If Saban says the Dawgs are gonna win the natty, then that should tell you all you need to know.”
Tim and Gabe certainly are not alone in thinking that way. As a recent Associated Press story put it: “Georgia begins the season in a familiar spot — No. 1 — and facing the burden that anything less than a third national title in four seasons will be a disappointment.”
However, Smart said recently, “when you step into the shoes of a University of Georgia football player, you accept that challenge is going to be there. We kind of embrace that and we love it.”
On a daily basis, though, the national rankings and season projections don’t figure into it much for Smart, who, like his mentor, Saban, is all about the “process,” taking it one day or game at a time.
Still, for the rest of the college football world, predicting who wins the conference, who gets into the playoff and who wins the natty are a preseason ritual.
I’ve checked out quite a few of those projections and, so far, most are sold on Georgia as a lock to make the playoff.
The Athletic’s playoff projection model — which takes play-by-play data and creates a projection for each team by simulating the season 100,000 times, to see how many games a team is expected to win and how many times they win their conference and make the playoff — gives Georgia the best playoff prospects of any conference team, with an 89 percent chance.
(The model predicts Georgia will have 10 wins and 2 losses, but still gives the Bulldogs a nation-leading 89% chance of making the playoff. It gives UGA a 38.5% chance of winning the SEC title, with Texas next at 20.2%. No team has a better chance of making the CFP and winning the national title, the Athletic said, and no Power 4 conference team has a better chance to win its conference.)
Smart, meanwhile, has sent a message to his team by borrowing this season’s slogan from Nike: “Assume nothing.”
“It’s been almost like a reset button for everybody: ‘Let’s start fresh,’” tight ends coach Todd Hartley said. “Don’t assume we’re already on third base, because we’re not.”
Of course, with all the changes in the game, it’s not just the Bulldogs who face long odds in trying to make it through the regular season unscathed. There wasn’t any team picked to run the table in the USA Today Sports record projections for this season. (They see the Dawgs losing once; same thing for Ohio State and Oregon.)
But with the expanded CFP, most prognosticators see Georgia as one of the playoff teams, even if it doesn’t win the SEC, as long as the Dawgs don’t have more than 2 losses.
The Vegas oddsmakers, meanwhile, have the Dawgs as 3-1 favorites to win the national title.
The teams getting the most discussion as possible national championship contenders at this point are Georgia, Ohio State, Oregon and Texas (based chiefly on early media hype following a strong season last year). However, the Longhorns, like Georgia, have a pretty tough schedule, and they also have suffered season-ending injuries to two of their running backs. So, maybe Utah, in its first year in the Big 12, or the ACC champion might replace them among the four favorites.
Meanwhile, the Dawgs will open their home schedule Sept. 7, playing host to the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles in a remodeled Sanford Stadium that has a new seating capacity: 93,033, an increase of 287 over the previous official capacity of 92,746.
Ahead of the season, Smart has mentioned his concerns about the defensive front (where injuries are an early factor) and replacing three of last year’s five starters in the secondary.
Still, talentwise the 2024 Dawgs are loaded, with 15 Bulldogs included on the 2024 Preseason Coaches All-Southeastern Conference Team, including a conference-high five on the first team.
Those first-teamers were senior quarterback Carson Beck, junior running back Trevor Etienne (a transfer from Florida), senior offensive lineman Tate Ratledge, senior defensive lineman Nazir Stackhouse and junior safety Malaki Starks.
The second-teamers: senior offensive lineman Xavier Truss, junior offensive lineman Dylan Fairchild, junior tight end Oscar Delp, senior linebacker Smael Mondon Jr., junior linebacker Mykel Williams and sophomore all-purpose player Dillon Bell. Junior defensive back Daylen Everette, senior receiver Dominic Lovett, junior punter Brett Thorson and redshirt sophomore offensive lineman Earnest Greene III were voted onto the third team.
Beck has drawn quite a bit of preseason Heisman Trophy talk and is seen as the key to the offense. Coordinator Mike Bobo has said he wants the starting QB to throw more long balls, in keeping with Smart’s philosophy that “explosive” plays are the key indicator of success. Gunner Stockton appears to be the leading candidate to back up Beck.
While Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey are gone to the NFL and Georgia doesn’t have any highly touted wide receivers (Rara Thomas recently was kicked off the team), it is considered to have the strongest tight end unit in the country, with 11 of them, led by Oscar Delp, Lawson Luckie and transfer Ben Yurosek (Stanford).
Among the wideouts, Lovett, Bell and speedster Arian Smith are established playmakers, and transfers Colbie Young (from Miami), London Humphreys (from Vanderbilt) and Michael Jackson (USC) should be targeted quite a bit, too.
The running back corps isn’t as deep as in some recent seasons and has some gimpy players, but Etienne is a veteran (1,472 yards, 15 TDs in two seasons as a Gator), though there remains the possibility he might miss the Clemson game if he’s suspended for recent driving infractions. Sophomore Roderick Robinson is dealing with a turf toe injury, but Branson Robinson (who missed last season because of an injury) appears to be healthy, walk-on Cash Jones is reliable and highly touted freshman Nate Frazier drew a lot of favorable talk during preseason camp.
Georgia also has a deep, experienced offensive line, led by Greene and Ratledge.
All in all, the Dawgs should have one of the nation’s more productive offenses. Take it from Co-Defensive Coordinator Glenn Schumann, whose players face that offense daily in practice: “It’s a great opportunity every day to go against our offense,” he said at a recent press conference. “At every level, all the positions … really talented. Carson plays at a really high level. There’s depth in the running back room, in the receiver room and in the tight end room. … It’s really challenging for every position group on our side of the field. It’s an awesome opportunity for us to compete against them every day.”
Speaking of Georgia’s defense, among the likely standouts are end/outside linebacker hybrid Williams, who’ll be playing more on the edge this season in hopes of him getting to opposing quarterbacks; first-team All-American safety Starks; and a strong linebacking corps led by Mondon (who also possibly could face a suspension) and CJ Allen.
Like I said, the DL has had injury problems, but Stackhouse is expected to be among the standouts. (And, before anyone suggests that I “forgot” this player or that player, I wasn’t attempting here to mention everyone — just highlighting some expected stars.)
All of that brings us to my annual trip out on a limb with a season prediction, to kick off my 20th season of writing the Junkyard Blawg. The past two years, I hedged slightly by saying that, assuming key players got and remained healthy, I didn’t see any reason why Georgia shouldn’t go at least 11-1, which I added should be read as “12-0, barring an unforeseen disaster.”
This year, however, I see 11-1 as the more likely scenario than going undefeated. The odds of the Dawgs making it through that murderer’s row of road trips without a slipup are just too great.
Regardless, I do expect them to make it to the SEC Championship Game and into the playoff.
And, assuming they get that far, I think Georgia’s odds of another national championship are very good, because I like the mindset Smart has created for this team.
When asked at an early August meeting with the media whether the Dawgs were looking to prove a point after missing the playoff last year, senior defensive back Dan Jackson replied: “This year is a completely different team. We still have the same standards that we’ve had here at Georgia for a long time. We’re not worried about last year. We’re focused on this year.”
