Saturday’s game was one that Dawgs fans will be talking about for … maybe a day or two?
Georgia’s eighth straight win over the Auburn Tigers in the 129th installment of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry was a solid effort that saw Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs pulling away in the fourth quarter.
But on a day of major college football upsets that saw Vandy topple No. 1 Alabama and Arkansas beat No. 4 Tennessee, the No. 5 Dawgs quietly took care of business and avoided the upset bug with a 31-13 victory over their longest-standing rival.
Still, it wasn’t the sort of game that had fans at Sanford Stadium barking enthusiastically with joy. (More about that later.)
After they had played rather uninspired ball in the first halves of their two previous games, Smart had told ABC prior to kickoff Saturday that he wanted to see his team “start fast.”
I wouldn’t exactly call what we saw in the first quarter against Auburn a fast start, but the Dawgs did score on their first drive of the game, as running back Travis Etienne capped off a methodical drive with a 2-yard score in the first of his two touchdowns of the day, and Georgia held the Tigers to just a field goal going into the second quarter.
But the remainder of the first half remained largely a defensive battle, with the Dawgs tacking on another score with quarterback Carson Beck throwing the first of his two TD passes in the game, this one to Dominic Lovett, for a 14-3 Georgia halftime lead.
Auburn tried a 54-yard field goal attempt late in the second quarter, but it was blocked by Georgia safety Dan Jackson, who played the entire game with his usual 110% effort. (The Dawgs’ D could use a few more like him.)
The second half got off to a faltering start for the Dawgs, too, as the offense had a three-and-out on its first drive and Auburn’s Jarquez Hunter — praised by Smart as the best running back Georgia has faced this season — ripped off a 38-yard TD dash to tighten the score to an uncomfortably close 14-10 with 9:45 left in the third quarter.
One of the positives of the game for Georgia was the offense rediscovering its running game (mainly in the person of Etienne, with an assist from freshman Nate Frazier), which was on display in the Dawgs’ next scoring drive, where nine of the 12 plays were on the ground. That drive culminated with Etienne’s second TD of the day.
Getting a little desperate as the fourth quarter began, Auburn coach Hugh Freeze decided on the Tigers’ next drive to go for it on 4th-and-1 from his team’s own 44-yard line, only to have Dawgs linebacker Raylen Wilson sack Tigers QB Payton Thorne for a 4-yard loss.
The Dawgs then capitalized on great field position with a quick drive that ended with Beck throwing a short TD pass to Dillon Bell to make the score 28-10.
Aided by penalties against the sloppy Dawgs, Auburn got into scoring position again with 1st-and-goal at the Georgia 10 but the Dawgs’ defense stiffened and the Tigers were held to a field goal, to make it 28-13.
Georgia then launched another drive, with gambler Smart also deciding to go for it on 4th-and-1 and the Dawgs making it. A nice drive was derailed by a hail of yellow flags that resulted in the Dawgs facing an unusual 1st-and-40, but they regained enough of the lost territory for Peyton Woodring to add a 47-yard field goal to put UGA up 31-13 with 1:50 left in the game. And that’s the way it ended.
Overall, it was a typical Georgia-Auburn slobberknocker of a game. Georgia generally had a good day on offense, with no turnovers. The Dawgs’ mistakes were mostly in terms of penalties, and the running game finally got going in second half (let’s hope that trend continues). Smart indicated after the game that he thinks his team has a better running attack than it has shown so far.
On the other side of the ball, the defense did well overall, though there still were too many broken arm tackles. The Dawgs also gave up a few explosive plays on defense, though the Georgia offense also managed to notch a few long plays of its own.
But the patchwork, injury-plagued offensive line had an inconsistent day and gave up 2 sacks.
Beck completed 23 of 29 passes for 240 yards and 2 TDs, while Etienne finally started showing star potential, running 16 times for 88 yards and 2 TDs and catching 6 passes for 36 yards. Georgia ran for 141 yards and had 381 yards of total offense on 66 plays.
Smart said after the game that he thought Georgia was getting close to what he thinks the running game is capable of achieving. “We have good backs,” he said “We have a quarterback that gets us into the right run, and we’d hit some of those for 20 and 30, and we’re not — and that’s frustrating. A couple of those times I thought we could cash them in, but we did make a lot of plays in the run game.”
The Georgia defense held the Tigers’ run-pass-option offense to its season low of 13 points but did give up 337 yards on 58 plays. The Dawgs’ leading tacklers were Jackson with 7 and Malaki Starks with 6. Defensive end Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins had two of the Dawgs’ three sacks.
Summing up the defense’s day, Smart said he was pleased that his team had several “opportunistic stops. We had some fourth-down stops that were huge.”
Georgia now leads the all-time series with Auburn, 65-56-8.
Even though it wasn’t the most exciting game, it still was a very good day for the Dawgs in the big picture, what with unexpected losses for Alabama, Tennessee, USC, Missouri and Michigan leveling the playing ground for teams potentially competing for at-large playoff slots. More chaos in college football is good, in that it buys Georgia, which already has a loss and faces a daunting schedule, some breathing room.
So, that covers what happened on the field Saturday. However, there’s another aspect of the game that bears discussion after Smart departed from his usual praise for the fans in Sanford Stadium by calling out the Georgia crowd as a disappointment.
In his postgame talk with DJ Shockley of the Bulldogs’ radio network, the Georgia head coach granted that it was “hot out there today” but said he felt there was a lack of game-affecting passion on the part of the fans. “I can’t get crowd noise. … We’ve got to do a better job as fans.”
He’s right that it wasn’t the most fired-up Sanford Stadium crowd of the Smart era, but there probably were a few contributing factors despite the heat.
It might come as a shock to the folks who thought it was a good idea to close the Sanford Drive bridge to pedestrian traffic or let cold hot dogs be served in the grab-and-go concession lines, but not everything about Dooley Field at Sanford Stadium is conducive to a fun day for Georgia’s fans.
For one thing, my buddy Joel Provano found the incessant and very loud prerecorded music Saturday to be a problem. “Maybe if there wasn’t 1,000 decibels of noise coming from the scoreboard the crowd would be louder,” Joel said. “You couldn’t hold a conversation, couldn’t hear the PA announcer, couldn’t hear the referees. It was nonstop.”
That wasn’t a generational complaint, either, with my daughter Olivia agreeing, saying the music was “so loud you cannot have a conversation; it’s uncomfortably loud.” Olivia also complained that she couldn’t hear the officials explaining penalties because of the music.
However, the nature of the Bulldogs’ season so far might have more to do with the subdued crowd noise than stadium conditions.
Part of it might have been a holdover from the previous week’s disappointing visit to Tuscaloosa, but mainly I think it’s because this team just hasn’t shown the kind of magic yet that gets a crowd really juiced.
Even Eric Zeier, in his post-game summation on the radio broadcast, referred to it as “workmanlike” and “pedestrian. … the way we played, and in the stands.”
OK, so, yeah, Smart was right that Saturday’s Sanford Stadium crowd was not engaged and disruptive enough.
But, again, it’s only fair to point out that this team also has underwhelmed so far.
This was Georgia’s first meaningful home game in a season that was frontloaded with too many road/neutral games and this team feels more mortal than expected.
But Dawgs fans do need to be appreciative that we still are witnessing the glory era of UGA football. And we don’t get that many home games each year, so fans need to do their part. As was shown in the 2022 win over then No. 1-ranked Tennessee, the home crowd has the power to affect the game in a very positive way for the Dawgs.
So, let’s step it up a bit for the rest of this year’s home games (which include another visit by Tennessee) and appreciate what we have in the Smart era.
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