Georgia 41, Mississippi State 31: Let's Talk Hard Truths

If you are interested in reading a cheerful recap of a stirring Georgia Bulldog victory, you may want to stop reading here.

No, really. Somewhere on the internet there is an article praising Carson Beck for a career passing night. You may enjoy that article more than this one. 36 of 48 passing for 459 yards is indeed a gaudy stat line.

There is probably also one praising the Bulldog defensive line for stepping up against the run. That did happen, the happy article isn’t wrong. Georgia surrendered a stingy 79 yards of rushing on 26 attempts, an exemplary effort. But holding the SEC’s worst rushing offense to a low rushing total is not what you’ll read about below.

And as I type this someone else is typing an article praising the Sanford Stadium crowd for rising to Kirby Smart’s challenge and affecting the Bizarro Bulldog offense in key situations. You may want to bookmark that one. It will make you feel better than what you’re about to read.

Still here? Okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Hard Truth #1: This is the team we have.

I begin with a hard truth that objective college football watchers will grudgingly concede: Six games into the season your college football team quite simply is what it is.

Sure, there are occasional teams that take a great leap forward late in the season (see the 2007 Georgia Bulldogs), but for the most part the team you have at the midpoint of the year is the team you will have at the end, warts and all.

This Georgia football team is somewhere between the third and fifth best team in an extremely competitive SEC. It has several warts that will prevent it from winning a national title this season. That sentence is going to make some readers pretty upset. They’ll say I can’t possibly know that at this stage. They’ll say that Kirby and the staff are coaching them up hard every week. They’ll send me boozy late night emails accusing me of being a complete moron, a closet Alabama fan, or worse. That’s okay. Their frustration isn’t with me, not really. It’s with the truths that deep down they themselves recognize, and that I outline below.

Hard Truth #2: Your weaknesses matter more than your strengths.

Great football teams expose their opponents’ weaknesses. Georgia’s weaknesses are pretty clear at this point.

The secondary is a liability in a way it has not been since Kirby Smart’s first season in Athens. The Georgia Bulldog defense made freshman quarterback Michael Van Buren look good tonight. In his second career start Van Buren finished the game 20 of 37 passing for 306 yards and 3 touchdowns.

After a shaky start Van Buren lit up the UGA defense in the second half. He was able to do that in part because the Red and Black secondary remains porous. The word is out on Daylen Everette. He’s a physical run defender, and an athletic cover corner, but his eye discipline is suspect at times and he cannot recover to the ball effectively once beaten. Isaiah Bond is going to burn him for at least 125 yards and 2 touchdowns in Austin next Saturday. I suspect he is a better option than freshman Ellis Robinson, IV at this point, or he wouldn’t be starting. That doesn’t mean he’s reliable against elite receivers. He demonstrably isn’t consistently reliable against lesser talent.

The wide receivers on the roster simply aren’t the difference makers that Ladd McConkey was. Arian Smith had 5 receptions for 134 yards and a touchdown. He also had a couple of entirely predictable drops. Dillon Bell fights hard for the ball and can make the tough catch. But he’s struggled to get open consistently. Colbie Young looked like the next clutch receiver for the Red and Black. Next week instead of being on the field in Austin he’ll be conferring with his lawyers. There simply isn’t a consistent go-to receiver on this roster, much less the 2-3 needed to reliably stretch a good defense.

Oscar Delp and Ben Yurosek are fine young men whose parents should be very proud of them. I anticipate they will both be good citizens, great fathers, and perhaps even NFL football players, at least for a time. Neither one is a substitute for Brock Bowers. Delp had a season high 2 catches for 28 yards. The Georgia offense needs that to be a slow half for him.

The offensive line has not gelled. Coming into this season we thought the offensive line might be the strongest position group on this team. At times, all season and today, it has been excellent. At other times, it has been a shambles. Ernest Greene received preseason All-SEC consideration but has struggled to a degree that makes me think he cannot be completely healthy. Micah Morris has the size and physicality, but still misses too many assignments. I don’t think the plan going into this season was ever to be starting Drew Bobo at center. Monroe Freeling and Xavier Truss have been good but inconsistent. Guys with their tenure in the program aren’t supposed to be building consistency. That’s more of a freshman/sophomore project.

These are position groups at which Georgia is vulnerable. If I know this, and you know this, I’m fairly certain Steve Sarkisian has noticed.

Most worrying….

Hard Truth #3: Lack of discipline loses football games.

The Bulldogs tackled better against the Bizarro Bulldogs than they have all season. So that’s good.

But I’m not convinced yet that Georgia’s season-long tackling issues have been solved. Especially looking at the stable of shifty playmakers awaiting in Austin. The time to establish good tackling habits is in fall camp. You don’t learn that six weeks into the season. Poor tackling comes down to discipline.

The Bulldog defense decided to switch things up today by giving up big plays not by missing tackles but by blowing coverages. I hate to flog Daylen Everette again, but he and Julian Humphrey both gave up big plays on which the receiver simply ran past them while their eyes were in the backfield. Those sort of eye-discipline issues can’t happen with veteran players. Not six games into the season, not if you want to compete with national championship caliber teams.

Another thing a well-coached veteran team shouldn’t do? Commit costly penalties. Georgia was flagged 5 times for 54 yards, which on the surface isn’t awful. But a pair of penalties really changed the complexion of this game.

Leading 34-10 Georgia had Mississippi State on the ropes. The crowd smelled blood. On 3rd and 8 Van Buren threw incomplete toward receiver Seydou Traore, a ball that Traore didn’t really have much hope of bringing in. But freshman Chris Cole draped himself over Traore, was flagged, and in the process extended the drive. Georgia again forced a 3rd down, and Chaz Chambliss got home on the pass rush to sack Van Buren. But in the process he ripped off Van Buren’s helmet, earning another penalty and gifting the Maroon and White another first down.

They’d use it to score a touchdown that made the score 34-17. The Bulldog offense would answer with a 4 play, 64 yard drive…..that ended when Carson Beck threw an unnecessary interception from the Mississippi State 11. It was one of two Beck interceptions, both of which led directly to points. The visitors used this one to march 80 yards for a touchdown to draw within 10 before a shocked crowd.

Another sign of lack of discipline? The inability to put away an inferior opponent. The fact that Georgia was playing starters deep into the fourth quarter against this Mississippi State team is a loss, no matter what the scoreboard says. The fact that Georgia was up by ten and struggling to put the ball in the endzone with those same starters with under four minutes left in the game is a loss. Losing focus against Mississippi State was costly. Doing so against teams like Ohio State, Texas, or Oregon would be 100% fatal.

Not all wins are created equal. You see, this Mississippi State team is not good. Not even close.

Which brings me to my final harbinger of undisciplined football: playing down to your competition. I know, Kirby will almost certainly say in his postgame press conference that “every week is a battle in the SEC” and “every team in this league has elite athletes.” The elite athletes from this Mississippi State team lost 41-17 to Toledo four weeks ago, boss. That’s an uncomfortable data point for adherents to the “every week is a battle” theory. Elite teams take care of business against lesser opponents. This Georgia team has played with fire all season. Do that enough times and you get burned.

I’m sorry if this assessment of the Georgia Bulldogs seems harsh, especially on the heels of a win. But I’d be doing you no favors by telling you that everything with this team is fine and that they’re thiissss close to flipping the switch and rounding into national title run form. This team is much closer to needing to beat Tennessee, Ole Miss, and Georgia Tech to avoid a 9-3 record and potentially missing the College Football Playoff. The team that’s shown up for large chunks of the 2024 season, including today, will get its doors blown off in Austin in front of a prime time national television audience a week from today.

And six games into the season isn’t the time to fix the issues that make that likely. That time was back in April during spring practice, over the summer during offseason workouts, and in August during fall camp. This team is what it is. And what it is worries me greatly. I’m hopeful that the issues that have emerged and persisted will be fixed in the next six days. But I’m not optimistic they will. I’ll still cheer and I’ll still live and die with the Red and Black. But I will not ignore what’s in front of my own eyes. Hard truths don’t become falsehoods because we don’t like them. And flawed football teams don’t get fixed overnight. Until later…

Go ‘Dawgs!!!