Of the handful of SEC teams with serious aspirations to make the College Football Playoff, the Georgia Bulldogs and the Ole Miss Rebels are chief among them. When looking at the latest FPI rankings over on ESPN.com, you can see that Ole Miss has the second best chances of making the playoff behind Alabama at 68.9 percent. Georgia has the third best odds in the SEC at 56.7 percent.
Entering Week 6, that would have Ole Miss slated to be the SEC runner-up to Alabama as the projected No. 4 seed and getting a first-round bye. Georgia would be the third of six SEC teams to get in. In this projection, the Dawgs would get the No. 7 seed and would host effectively the last team in with the No. 10-seeded Oklahoma Sooners coming to Athens. Of course, we have a lot of football left.
It is why Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin just put his foot in his mouth as the rare frontrunner here...
Lane Kiffin's dynasty comments should awaken sleeping giant in Georgia.
Kiffin said as much in Mark Schlabach's latest for ESPN, fully believing the age of dynasties are over.
"In my opinion, the dynasties are over. Alabama with Coach Saban and then Kirby at Georgia, where they had those rosters year in, year out and there would be a bunch of wins by 30 points in the conference, those days are done."
He then followed by saying the dawn of NIL has prevented dynastic teams from ever stockpiling.
"When I was at Alabama, they'd be like, 'Go watch the outside linebackers,' and there's six of them over there that are first-round picks. That's not going to happen anymore because if they don't play, then they're going to leave. They can't keep them all anymore."
Kiffin then mentioned in a nine-game conference schedule, we may have to temper our expectations.
"You're going to have really good teams going 8-4 because we're going to play nine conference teams, including five on the road. The conference has never been this balanced, and it never used to have Texas and Oklahoma, two top-10 teams and two of the hardest places in the country to play.
He should be careful what he wishes for, as throwing dirt on a not-dead Georgia team is a bad idea.
Kirby Smart must use latest Lane Kiffin slight as a source of motivation
No, this is not Smart effectively gaslighting his 2022 team by saying Georgia is going 7-5 this season. That team went 15-0 en route to winning back-to-back national championships. As the years have gone along since that game, more and more people in the college football space have been more than willing to poke holes in Smart's fading Georgia dynasty. This is the defending SEC champion...
Truth be told, Kiffin's Rebels did beat Smart's Dawgs in Oxford last year in a wet and wild one. Ole Miss has been the best team in the SEC through five weeks for the most part. Although they do not play a Power Four team in the non-conference, nobody is going to dock them for scheduling a Power Five team in Washington State or a near enough one in The American powerhouse Tulane, who they beat.
That being said, Georgia's dynastic run of the SEC ends when Smart and his players allow it to be. Just because Georgia does not look the part of a national champion once again does not mean this thing is over. Look for Georgia to play with a crashing sense of urgency the rest of the way after losing yet another heartbreaker to Alabama. Then again, they might be more interested in doughnuts now...
Smart may need to break a bulletin-board with his clenched fist like Will Muschamp did a whiteboard.