Georgia’s 39-34 loss to Mississippi in the Sugar Bowl will go down as one of the most disappointing finishes to a season in Bulldogs football history. Back-to-back years of the season ending in the College Football Playoff quarterfinal after the high of an SEC championship victory, in the very same building no less is not what anyone wanted to see. But what makes it worse is all the differences between last year’s team and this one.
Last year’s Bulldogs overachieved to win the SEC amid a year of shaky offensive line play, dropped passes and an unreliable run defense— not to mention the fact that their starting quarterback Carson Beck was lost for the season at halftime of the SEC Championship. This year’s team however had an improved running game, better receivers and a young defense that overcame some early-season struggles to play its best football at the tail end of the year. They also had Gunner Stockton who looked more confident with each start and was taking care of the ball.
It felt like a different kind of team and a different kind of season. Until it wasn’t.
Ole Miss ruined Georgia's dream season
A Mississippi team who had to deal with its head coach walking out after the regular season—and all the drama that came with it—played lights out. Quarterback Trinidad Chambliss put on an all-time performance, capped off by a 40-yard completion on 3rd and five on the game’s final drive that set up Lucas Carniero’s game-winning field goal.
Georgia’s defense that had previously looked like it turned a corner now couldn’t get a stop. The running game faltered towards the end. Stockton and the offense went on a heroic drive in the final minutes, but couldn’t score the go-ahead touchdown with first and goal from the 8-yard line. They settled for the tie, and Mississippi proceeded to walk it off.
By the end of it all, Georgia was left stunned. A season that had seemed poised for a deep playoff run was over, just like that. And it’ll take time to pick up the pieces.
“I’m sick that we lost,” head coach Kirby Smart said. via ca.sports.yahoo.com. “There’s things I would love to go back and do differently, but I’m just proud of the way our guys competed when down ten (points in the fourth quarter), and just didn’t finish it.”
This was a game where Smart’s experience over Mississippi head coach Pete Golding was supposed to shine through, seeing as this was his 138th career game as a head coach while it was Golding’s second. Instead, Smart was the one owning up to in-game errors after the clock hit zero.
Smart took the blame for a disastrous fourth down sack deep in Georgia territory where the Bulldogs switched their punt team out for their offense in an attempt to draw Mississippi offsides. Mississippi scored two plays later to take a 10 point lead.
Georgia's status as top dog is slipping away
The memory of Georgia’s back-to-back national title wins in 2021 and 2022 is not going to fade any time soon. It takes longer than three years to forget about something as cathartic as that. But Georgia’s identity as the new college football superpower, the new team to beat after Nick Saban retired from his post at Alabama, is slipping.
And while the homogenization of college football that the Transfer Portal allows has more to do with that than anything else, the fact that Georgia can’t break into the semifinal is well short of the championship standard it has set for itself.
A big selling point for Georgia football often repeated to recruits is that you come to their program to play on the biggest stages. That Georgia is where you go if you want to play for championships and learn what it takes to be great. That they’re wired differently in Athens.
A loss like this, to a team whose head coach is in his second game and one they’ve already beaten this season, hurts that image quite a bit. Georgia hasn’t won a playoff game since those consecutive national titles, and while they do have two SEC titles, the lack of deep runs in January goes against their entire brand.
This is supposed to be the “championship pedigree” program in college football. Entering the playoff, Smart was just one of two head coaches in the field who had won a national title, Ohio State’s Ryan Day being the other.
There’s no going back to the way things were in 2021 and 2022 where championship rosters were loaded with future NFL starters along the first three rungs of the depth chart. Georgia probably won’t ever have a defensive line with the likes of Jordan Davis, Jalen Carter, Travon Walker and Devonte Wyatt again.
But no one will be feeling sorry for them there. The Bulldogs, and Smart, have something to prove now that they can still contend for championships and navigate the field when more teams than ever have a shot at the national title in a given year.
The loss to Ole Miss, demoralizing as it may be, should not trigger any sweeping changes or signal any grave issues within the program. Georgia is likely to retool in the portal and run it back. But it will prompt some soul-searching.
The Bulldogs have a long offseason ahead where they’ll aim to block out the thoughts about what could have been and pillage on towards Smart’s third national title. But this looked like as good of a shot as ever, and it ended shockingly quick. Time will tell if that becomes a trend for this program in the new era of the sport.