Georgia football: Observations of Georgia’s opponents after week six
Georgia football improved to 6-0 for the first time since 2005 Saturday when they defeated Vanderbilt 45-14 in Nashville.
The Bulldogs keep rolling through the 2017 football season. Their latest victim was the Vanderbilt Commodores who they beat 45-14 much to the dissatisfaction of head coach Kirby Smart.
He sets the bar very high for Georgia football and that’s led to them avoiding complacency and playing at a very high level on every snap. Knowing that’s it’s hard to find a loss looking down Georgia’s schedule.
There’s only one championship contender remaining who will certainly play Georgia close. But everyone else, they will need a major letdown to not obliterate. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look back at this past Saturday to see how Georgia’s opponents performed. Except for Missouri because they’ll be broken down further in a game preview later this week.
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Florida: recent offensive success was a false alarm
Lately, Florida’s offense has looked fairly decent. They were forced to settle on Felipe Franks as their quarterback against Vanderbilt and he led them to a season high 38 points. The week before they scored 28 against Kentucky and 26 against Tennessee. Maybe the Gators had found the formula for offensive success.
Not quite. The LSU Tigers shut Florida down for just 16 points. They did manage to run for 194 yards and Franks had a good completion percentage. But Franks only had 104 yards and the Gators couldn’t sustain drives.
LSU however rushed for 216 yards and their quarterback Danny Etling wasn’t much better than Franks. But he was good enough to beat Florida.
And if LSU’s method of beating Florida sounds familiar, it’s how Georgia wins every game. Pound the defense with a running game consisting of multiple backs and don’t make mistakes in the passing game. Only Jake Fromm is a better quarterback than Etling. And he’s throwing to better targets like Terry Godwin and Javon Wims.
The consensus heading into 2017 is that Florida still has one of the SEC’s better defenses. But they allowed tepid offense to obtain 341 total yards. Michigan torched them, Vanderbilt played their best game on offense, Kentucky should have scored 30 on them.
They’re sixth in the SEC in total defense with 1,866 yards, and seventh in points per game at 373. Plus they’re eighth with 24.2 points per game. For comparison, Georgia is in the top-10 in all of those categories.
At what point do we say that the Gators just aren’t any good this year. Blame it on injuries or suspensions if you want. But why aren’t they developing quarterbacks? Why has the defense regressed? They have good running backs, so why aren’t they changing games?
I’m not saying we’ll for sure dominate them in three weeks. All I’m saying is that we should dominate them. Anything less will be an unsatisfactory.