ESPN commentator and SEC football pot-stirrer Paul Finebaum had some interesting remarks about Georgia football on a recent episode of “The Paul Finebaum Show”.
With Georgia now having had two straight seasons of College Football Playoff disappointment in the quarterfinal round, it’s now been three full seasons since they last made the semifinals.
And Finebaum seemed concerned about that, or at least he did on behalf of the fan base.
“The narrative is in cement,” Finebaum said. “"Kirby Smart can't seem to win the Sugar Bowl. He's won two SECs in a row, four out of five, two National Championships sprinkled in, but there are some fans who are pretty uneasy about the last two seasons and how they've ended.”
Georgia Sugar Bowl woes is a concerning trend for the program
The loss to Notre Dame at the end of the 2024 season was a dud for Georgia. Playing with their then-backup quarterback Gunner Stockton, the same issues that had plagued Georgia all season came back to haunt them. Ill-timed turnovers, dropped passes and a lack of a running game all contributed to an ugly loss.
This past loss to Ole Miss was a different flavor of disappointment. The Bulldogs, who had won a regular season matchup between the two teams, opened as six-point favorites but lost to an upstart Mississippi team playing without Lane Kiffin. Georgia couldn’t fluster quarterback Trinidad Chambliss and failed to sustain drives on offense on its way to one of the most surprising losses in program history under Smart.
It shouldn’t be understated what a bad loss that game was for Georgia. But rumblings of what “some fans”, in Finebaum’s words, are saying, or what guest analyst Jake Trotter said on Finebaum’s show– perhaps are a bit overblown.
“It's not like they had a bad year,” Trotter said. “But it wasn't the same level of Georgia team we have seen under Kirby Smart where all right, like this is the best team in the country or one of the two best and they're the team to beat. You never felt like that last year, at least I didn't.”
Trotter is right. It’s not the same level of Georgia team as we might be used to, namely the 2021 or 2022 squads that won back to back national titles. But that’s where the problem comes in.
Expectations for Georgia may need a reset
It would be obtuse to hold Georgia to the same standards as those teams, who date back to an era before NIL and the transfer portal had completely taken over college football and evened out rosters to a degree we haven’t seen before.
Do you know how many players from that 2021 team have been drafted into the NFL? 45. It’s the most of any team ever, and a total that no team will likely ever reach again.
We live in a different era now. The Indiana Hoosiers (!) of all programs just went 16-0 and won the national title, largely through an overwhelming yet shrewd use of the transfer portal and rich NIL deals.
Those Georgia teams from 2021 and 2022 are the last guard of stacked, pre-NIL juggernaut teams that feature future NFL players on three rungs of the depth chart at most positions.
There’s more parity within the SEC and Big 10 now than ever before— which is noteworthy, considering as disappointing as some might consider the last two years of Georgia football, they still won back to back SEC titles in an era where the conference is arguably deeper than ever. Even Vanderbilt just went 10-2.
This is not to make excuses for Smart and the Bulldogs, or to argue that what they’ve done in 2024 and 2025 is good enough. It’s not, and everyone in Athens knows the standard is still to compete for national titles.
But whatever Georgia fans Finebaum is referring to who feel “uneasy” about the program should know this— neither the Bulldogs or any other program are ever going to get back to the utterly dynastic level they were at when they won back-to-back titles.
That doesn’t mean they won’t win a title again. It just means that level doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a casualty of the NIL-portal era. Take it from Smart:
“I tell people all the time … our best Alabama teams — I’m going to go 2012, 13, 14, 15 — would beat the dog out of all these teams right now because they could practice different and they were deeper,” Smart said in an interview on “The Next Round Live”. “The game has not changed that much from 2012 to 2025, but the roster [depth] has.”
More teams are truly capable of competing for a national title than ever before, and while that may be a hard pill for Bulldogs fans to swallow, it’s simply reality.
The classic idea of the college football dynasty is dead. There’s more roster turnover, games needed to reach the title game, screwed-up conferences and flat-out randomness within the sport than ever before. And yet, Georgia still finds itself in one of the best positions any program can be in, both for 2026 and the foreseeable future.
Yes, the past two years, especially this last one, were disappointing. But the Bulldogs are still as well-equipped to compete for titles in this new era as any program. It just might take some more patience now for the stars to all align.
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