Kirby Smart’s 100th win as head coach was one of the most impressive.
And that’s because it also was, as Smart pointed out afterward, one of the least expected wins of his tenure at Georgia.
The No. 5 Dawgs had been inconsistent while winning five of their first six games, so just about no one picked them to topple the No. 1 Texas Longhorns in Austin Saturday night. “I’m so proud of these guys,” Smart told ABC immediately after the game. “Nobody believed. Nobody gave us a chance.”
Although Smart called the 30-15 victory before a crowd of more than 100,000, “a team win,” there’s no doubt that the chief reason the Dawgs upset the favored Longhorns was due to the remarkable turnaround exhibited by the Georgia defense.
Up to this point of the season, most observers were saying that the 2024 defense was not up to the standards of — or as talented as — its three predecessors, which sent a lot of players to the NFL.
But on Saturday, they “woke up,” as Smart put it, and turned in one of the most courageous defensive performances I can remember, holding the top-ranked Longhorns to just 15 points as Texas was 2-for-15 on 3rd-down conversions (0-for-7 in the first half, when they had only 38 yards of offense). Coming into the game, the Horns ranked seventh nationally in scoring offense at 43.2 points per game.
There were defensive heroes aplenty for the Dawgs, with linebacker Jalon Walker playing like a man possessed as he led the team with 8 tackles, 3 of Georgia’s 7 sacks on the night, and was credited with 4 quarterback pressures.
Also turning in great performances were cornerback Daylen Everette, who had 7 tackles, forced a fumble on a sack and snagged an interception; and defensive end Mykel Williams, who had 2 sacks and seems to be back at full strength after playing only situational snaps in the past three games because of injury. Damon Wilson also had a sack and forced a fumble that was recovered by Walker.
The Georgia D had not played up to the program’s standard since the Clemson game, but Saturday they stepped up and won the game on a night when the Dawgs’ offense was more miss than hit. While to most observers it looked as if quarterback Carson Beck continued to struggle with his footwork, accuracy and composure (looking lost at times), Smart put the onus for the inconsistent offensive performance on the receivers — “our inability to catch a ball is almost comical,” the coach said after the game.
Beck completed 23 of 41 passes with 3 interceptions and no touchdowns. That means he now has thrown 8 picks in seven games, while he had only 6 in all of last season.
“I don’t think he’s doing anything different,” Smart said, adding that “we don’t have some of the same guys, you know what I mean? He’s carrying a lot of that burden with him.” In other words, Beck doesn’t have Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey to bail him out, as he did last year.
Summed up Smart about the offense: “I thought the offensive line played really good. I thought we ran the ball well. [Beck] had a lot of drops. Maybe without the drops, he doesn’t have as many interceptions.”
Now, let’s be clear about this: Part of Smart’s job as head coach is being head cheerleader. While he’ll occasionally throw a unit (not an individual player) under the bus, as he did the receivers Saturday night (probably in order to keep from damaging Beck’s confidence), he tends to put on rose-colored glasses in some of his assessments. He also said he thought Georgia’s defense played well against Mississippi State — not the prevailing opinion.
So, while many people were wondering what was wrong with Beck, Smart said he thought his QB played a “pretty good” game against Texas. Still, with the exception of a couple of clutch runs and a key third-down pass, I’ve heard no one else give the Georgia QB a positive grade for the majority of Saturday night’s game.
And even though his head coach refused to acknowledge Beck had anything but a good game, the QB himself said afterward that “I was just off, it felt like, the entire game. … I was just off, and that’s obviously really difficult. Not to say that games like that are going to happen, but you know, I can’t control everything. … I’ve got to go back and watch film, and I’ve got to get better. I’ve got to be better for this team.”
Indeed, if it hadn’t been for tailback Trevor Etienne, a fine game by a healthier offensive line and a suddenly revived running game, the stellar defensive performance might have gone for naught.
Of course, as anyone who watched the game knows, offensive woes were only one of the obstacles Georgia had to overcome, thanks to the worst SEC officiating crew I’ve seen since the days of the infamous Penn Wagers. Besides several very bogus calls and a terrible spotting of the ball on a key play, we saw two Georgia players ejected on targeting calls (one of which was extremely questionable) and a key pass interference call that initially negated a Texas interception overturned belatedly after Longhorns fans had covered one end of the field in bottles and cans, delaying play for some 5 minutes.
A pass interference call isn’t supposed to be reviewable, but it’s hard to believe that the meeting of the officials on the field that followed the trash-throwing and resulted in the flag being waved off didn’t involve them taking a glance at the numerous replays shown on the video screen.
While he was more circumspect in his post-game press conference, I think we got a much more truthful assessment from Smart in his comments to ABC immediately after the game when he said, “They tried to rob us in this place.”
Later, he said he wasn’t criticizing the officials, but he noted: “I will say that now if you set a precedent and throw a bunch of stuff on the field and endanger athletes, that you’ve got a chance to get your call reversed.”
He added: “And that’s unfortunate, because to me, that’s dangerous.”
While the conference issued a namby-pamby nondenial denial that the refs blew it on the belated reversal of that pass interference call, I’d be surprised if the crew that worked this game isn’t told behind closed doors: Don’t ever do that again.
Overall, despite faltering some in the third quarter when the Horns staged a bit of a comeback, I thought Georgia’s defensive play was amazing, with constant pressure and a much better performance from the secondary (even after the ejections). The Dawgs had a great defensive game plan, with Smart saying that “we changed some things up defensively that I think helped us.”
The key, he said, was stopping the Texas running game. Indeed, the Horns had only 29 net yards of offense on the ground.
For Georgia, there were a couple of too-conservative calls offensively (particularly on one 4th-and-1), but generally Mike Bobo called a good game, offensively, especially on the fourth-quarter drive that gave the Dawgs breathing room again after Texas had narrowed the score to 23-15.
The Dawgs didn’t execute that well in the passing game, and their 108 yards on the ground (87 of which were gained by Etienne on his 19 carries) might not seem that impressive compared with what they have done in the past, but they got the job done when it was absolutely necessary.
Georgia beat the No. 1 ranked team on the road when nobody thought they could, and because of that this season feels totally changed. It’s game-on for these Dawgs, who might be flawed, but should be a force to be reckoned with.
As ABC-ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit put it Saturday night: “Georgia, despite what happened in Tuscaloosa, is still Georgia.”
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