Georgia Football lost to Florida 24-10 on Saturday to fall to 4-4 on the 2016 season.
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Saturday was not a good day to be a Georgia Football fan. The Bulldogs lost 24-10, had under 170 yards of total offense, and left fans with more concerns than reasons to be optimistic.
But Georgia only lost by 14 and led 10-7 at one point of the ball game. Georgia was in position to win for most of the afternoon, but several things led to the Bulldogs not being able to keep up with the Gators. Here are the biggest reasons why Georgia lost to Florida.
Field Position
I said it Thursday night in my story on here, field position would help decide the outcome. All night long Florida played offense with the short field while Georgia was always backed up closer to the end zone.
To win a field position battle you need first downs, Georgia had eight and Florida had 20. You need good punts, Georgia averaged 32.0 yards per punt, Florida averaged 47.8 with two downed inside the 20-yard line.
Georgia’s defense played a pretty good game, they only allowed 231 total yards. But having to defend a short field is difficult for any defense.
Play calling
I’m not the kind of guy to be over critical of play calling. I believe coaches generally know best and I am not an experienced offensive coordinator. But any one has the right to be critical of Jim Chaney’s play calling against Florida.
There will be a bigger piece on Chaney later this week (Mostly an apology from yours truly about a piece a posted two months ago). But to some up his play calling against Florida, it was bad and any other synonym you can think of.
Florida has a great defense and they deserve a lot of credit, but Georgia didn’t do anything on offense to make their nights any tougher. If anything, it was made easier.
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Yes Georgia does have a bad offensive line and that makes things difficult, but you absolutely should not call slow developing plays that keep the ball in the back field too long and puts more pressure on the offensive line. Just eliminate those from the playbook until the line shows major improvements.
That’s what Chaney did tonight. There are workarounds to having a bad offensive line, and we used none of them tonight. All game we kept doing the same thing to no avail. I do not know what Chaney has seen to make him think the plays he calls will work, but a 10 point performance with two big plays coming from the quarterback improvising does not show good judgement.