It was a typically bruising, close Saturday night battle for the Dawgs in Lexington.
As has been the case in recent trips to Kentucky, Kirby Smart’s Dawgs had all they could handle in the scrappy, fired-up Wildcats and barely escaped Kroger Field with a razor-thin 13-12 victory.
And Smart’s troops left Lexington with much to work on during the bye week before their Sept. 28 visit to Tuscaloosa.
Or, as a battered Georgia quarterback Carson Beck said immediately after the game: “Thank God we have a bye week. Kentucky is a physical game.”
Still, after three games of the 2024 season, the Dawgs have not allowed any opponent into their end zone. In fact, Georgia has not given up a touchdown in four consecutive games, dating back to last season, and has had just 18 points scored against it this season.
After the game, Smart attributed the Dawgs keeping opponents from crossing the goal line to “good red zone defense, staying away from explosives. I mean, look, football’s hard these days. Our defense takes a lot of pride in how they play.”
Smart noted that “You look at our defensive-line, freshmen are stepping up. We got freshmen all over the field. Guys are being put in places, fighting through injuries, all the above. I’m super proud of them and how they played tonight.”
Cornerback Daylen Everette led the Georgia defense with 8 tackles, including 6 solo. Eleven Bulldogs had at least 4 stops.
But, Smart said, “we’re going to play better and better offenses. We’ve got to get better and better, but it’s pretty hard to do.”
Offensively, as Smart told ABC’s Molly McGrath after the game, “we did what we had to do” to win.
But they didn’t do much more than that. “We did not look good tonight,” Smart acknowledged. But, he said, “you gotta find ways to win these, and that’s what we did.”
Georgia got off to another slow start Saturday night, as the offensive line was outplayed early in the game by an aggressive Wildcats defense that appeared to shake the confidence of Beck while also shutting down the Bulldogs’ rushing attack. (And that was the case even before OL mainstay Tate Ratledge left the game with ankle and knee injuries.)
UGA converted only 5 of 13 third-down attempts (only 1 in the first half) while Kentucky was 9-of-16. The Wildcats outgained Georgia, with 284 yards of total offense to the Dawgs’ 262, and Kentucky also dominated time of possession, 35:02 to 24.58.
The Cats, embarrassed last week in a 31-6 home loss to South Carolina, definitely looked like the more motivated team.
The result was the lowest first-half offensive output of the Smart era at UGA and the fewest first-half yards since 2009 — just 3 first downs and 63 yards. Meanwhile, Kentucky had 12 1st downs and 130 total yards in the first half.
Part of the reason for Georgia’s limited output was that Beck had his worst outing as the Dawgs’ starter, looking particularly shaky in the first half, when he missed some throws and fumbled a snap.
The Dawgs’ offense seemed not to find any rhythm until the second half (and then only sporadically), but receiver Dominic Lovett said that Georgia’s difficulty moving the ball chiefly was due to the Wildcats. “They played with energy and physicality; they played a great game. Props to them. I’m not going to say that we couldn’t get in a rhythm; that is simply just a very good team.”
On the plus side, though, Georgia had no turnovers for the third consecutive game. And the Bulldogs had 3 sacks (Kentucky had none), and Georgia forced 3 fumbles, though they recovered only one of them, which led to a UGA field goal.
As for the Georgia offense, while it was more productive in the second half, with running back Trevor Etienne gaining key yardage and Beck threading the needle on several passes, it was a barely passable performance overall for Offensive Coordinator Mike Bobo’s unit.
As Smart told DJ Shockley of the Georgia radio network after the game, the Dawgs missed a lot of blocks and weren’t great offensively on the perimeter. “There’s a lot of things we can improve on,” he concluded.
Of course, the banged-up Dawgs came into the game missing four injured starters, including three on the defensive line. “It was a little bit of bend but don’t break,” Smart told Shockley, adding with an ironic laugh: “We’ve got some dudes missing up front!”
However, Smart said he was proud of his team’s “resiliency,” adding that he thought the Kentucky game “was a culture win, because the guys never panicked.”
“It’s never easy on the road in the SEC,” Beck told the media after the game. “Look at the first SEC road games the last few years. Missouri, ‘22, dogfight; Auburn last year, dogfight; this year, dogfight. But we knew that coming in.”
Still, as Smart said, there are a lot of areas that need improving if these Dawgs are going to negotiate a very difficult schedule, particularly on the road.
Just hitting the lowlights, there were an incredible number of missed tackles by the Georgia defense Saturday night. It seemed Kentucky running back Demie Sumo-Karngbaye (who had a net 98 yards) continually was running through arm tackles for additional yardage. The Cats had several long drives, including an 11-play, 61-yard trek to open the second half that ate up nearly 6 minutes. Fortunately, it ended with just a 40-yard field goal.
Looking ahead, the chief concern for the Georgia defense appears to be injuries, but on offense the Dawgs can’t afford too many more slow starts.
Also, while Etienne looked great on the 4th-quarter drive, where Georgia finally scored a touchdown, the rushing attack had difficulty against a very stout Cats defensive front.
The Dawgs also had too many penalties — though part of that seemed to be due to the flag-happy nature of the evening’s SEC officiating crew, particularly in the first half, when the guys in black and white seemed to want to control the game.
For the evening, Beck completed 15 of 24 passes for 160 yards. On the other side, Kentucky transfer QB Brock Vandagriff, who was Beck’s backup last season, completed a career-high 14 of his 27 pass attempts for 114 yards.
Smart, who related that he and Vandagriff said they loved each other when they hugged after the game, praised the former Bulldog but added that “we were able to stop him when we had to.”
Dominic Lovett was Georgia’s leading receiver in the game, with a team-high 6 catches for 89 yards, including a 33-yarder. Etienne was the Dawgs’ leading ground-gainer, with 79 net yards on 19 carries. He almost scored on a long run where he was ruled out of bounds, and the Georgia TD came later in that series when Branson Robinson bulled over the goal line. That gave the Bulldogs their first lead of the game, 13-9, with 12:20 to play.
Another key play in the game came when tight end Oscar Delp was upended and fumbled after a reception where he appeared to be just short of the marker, but Arian Smith recovered the ball for a key 1st down (awarded after one of several overly long video reviews by the officiating crew).
On special teams, Brett Thorson had 6 punts for a 49.5-yard average. Georgia had punted only 5 times total in its first two games. Thorson has yet to have a punt returned this year.
The Dawgs now have won 42 consecutive regular season games, an ongoing school record; 28 consecutive regular season SEC games, another ongoing school record; and 16 consecutive true road games, also an ongoing school record.
Basically, to sum up Saturday night’s effort by the Bulldogs, you can apply the old saying that an ugly win is still a win.
But the Dawgs are going to have to do better as the opposition improves.
Smart summed it up to Shockley: “We’ve just got to be better … and be real honest about who we are.”
