Georgia needs Mike Bobo to trust Carson Beck to carry his offense through the SEC

In a matter of just a few years, it became much harder to dominate college football. All offseason, Kirby Smart warned about the deterioration of college football, which he essentially describes as the lack of depth on the top teams in the country due to the ease of player movement that the transfer portal provides. More basically, even Georgia and Alabama can’t bully their way to a national championship anymore. 

Through the first three weeks of the college football season, Georgia’s defensive line has experienced injury issues that have tested the depth and that unit hasn’t been nearly as dominant as the groups from 2021 and 2022 that led the Bulldogs to back-to-back national titles. Now, the offense is going through the same thing with a long-term injury to All-American right guard Tate Ratledge. 

In its 13-12 Week 3 win over Kentucky, a program that plucked Brock Vandagriff and Jamon Dumas-Johnson from Georgia's roster this offseason, Georgia was outplayed on both lines of scrimmage. In a world where you can no longer overwhelm a program that you’ve beaten 15 straight times with constant waves of talent, you have to rely on your very best players to be better than theirs, and on offense, Carson Beck is Georgia’s best player. However, offensive coordinator Mike Bobo isn’t treating his fifth-year senior quarterback that way. 

Against Kentucky, despite averaging 3.4 yards per carry, the Georgia offense ran the ball 63% of the time on early downs. Unsurprisingly, they only generated a 35% success rate and constantly put Beck behind the sticks with conservative play-calling. For the season, Georgia’s run game has produced a 39.2% success rate which ranks 88th in the country, and because of that, the team’s average third down distance is 7.42 yards which ranks in the 34th percentile. 

Georgia’s offense has had much more success through the air than on the ground this year, so Bobo needs to trust Beck and trust the offensive line to pass protect even after Beck was pressured on nine of his 27 dropbacks in Week 3. 

Bobo has been especially conservative in the first half of games, going into the break up just 6-0 on Clemson before blowing things wide open for a 34-3 win. Similarly, against Kentucky, Georgia was run-first to its detriment until it got the ball back down 9-3 in the third quarter. Then, Bobo allowed Beck to throw the ball on six of the first seven plays of the drive, marching the offense from its own 25-yard line to the Kentucky 13-yard before back-to-back handoffs to freshman running back Nate Frazier forced Beck into a third-and-9 and stalled the drive.

However, it’s not just when Beck should be throwing, it's the areas of the field that Bobo needs to allow him to attack. So far, 24.2% of Beck’s throws have been screens, inexplicably up 2% from last season, his first as Georgia’s starting quarterback, and the eighth highest in the country. A staggering 57.1% of his throws have come either behind the line of scrimmage or within nine yards of it which has produced an average depth of target of 7.7 that ranks 118th in the country. 

Georgia’s offense line has appeared to take a bit of a step back with the loss of Sedrick Van Pran-Grainger at center, but before the Ratledge injury, the Bulldogs had four returning starters. Beck has only been sacked twice and his average time to sack is a perfectly acceptable 4.40 seconds, so there isn’t a need to be overly cautious with getting the ball out of his hands, especially considering the results he’s generated when he does let the play develop. 

On Beck’s 47 dropbacks of over 2.5 seconds, he has completed 21 of 38 attempts for 394 yards (10.4 ypa) with six touchdowns to zero interceptions and 21 first downs. 

Beck has been more aggressive and more willing to hold onto the ball in 2024, which appears to be scaring Bobo, but the veteran quarterback is raising his risk level necessarily. Georgia hasn’t found dynamic replacements for Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey, so Beck doesn’t have receivers he trusts to win quickly and is forced to hang onto the ball much deeper into the play.

This offseason, Kirby Smart made it a priority to add receiving talent bringing in Colbie Young from Miami (FL) and London Humphreys from Vanderbilt, yet, through three weeks, Dominic Lovett and tight end Lawson Luckie are the only two players with over five targets who are averaging over 2.00 yards per route run. Humphreys flashed against Clemson, and Young is a big-bodied red zone weapon, but they haven't made the type of impact that Georgia's offense has needed, especially after Rara Thomas was dismissed from the program this summer.

Beyond the talent on the field, Bobo also isn’t giving his quarterback the opportunity to make big plays within the structure of the offense. Instead, he's deferring to the days when the Bulldogs did have all the best players on the field and could get 7.0 yards a pop on a screen instead of the 4.8 his offense is averaging this year.

On Beck’s 44 dropbacks of under 2.5 seconds, which are considered to be within the structure of the offense, his ADOT of 2.5 yards ranks 218th out of the 228 FBS and FCS quarterbacks with at least 50 dropbacks and he’s only averaging 6.5 yards per attempt. All of his “in-structure” numbers are worse than last season, partially a product of play-calling, and partially a result of the diminished talent around him. 

Though he’d prefer to distribute from the pocket, Beck has realized how vital it will be to create plays out of structure and out of the pocket on this particular team. Even Beck’s rushing has gotten better, racking up 59 scramble yards on the year after finishing 2023 with only 171. 

In a way, Beck desires to play like a college football version of Jared Goff or Brock Purdy, living ahead of the sticks with a dominant run game and dicing up a defense off play-action throws over the middle, but the circumstances in Athens have demanded he play like Josh Allen, a one-man show, an offense unto himself, and so far, he’s pulling it off.  

Outside of his scrambling, Georgia has yet to establish an effective run game, even with Trevor Etienne back on the field after his Week 1 suspension. Georgia rushers have been tackled at or behind the line of scrimmage on 17.7% of their carries, yet, Bobo refuses to go away from it, leaving Beck to make a play on third-and-long.

Still, the Bulldogs are 81st percentile for expected points added (EPA) per play because Beck’s dropbacks are so valuable, averaging 8.14 yards and 0.31 EPA (19th best). 

All of this adds up to a play-caller who desperately needs to start trusting his fifth-year quarterback who threw for over 4,000 yards a year ago and entered this season as the No. 1 quarterback on most NFL draft boards, to make more plays. One of Beck’s best traits from an NFL draft perspective is his ability to get the ball out of his hands, but this year, Georgia needs the ball in the hands of its best player, and that’s Beck. 

Bobo’s conservative play-calling nearly cost Georgia against Kentucky, but teams like Texas, Alabama, Ole Miss, and Tennessee won’t let the Bulldogs off the hook. College football has changed, even Georgia can’t rely purely on a talent advantage across the board, especially not in SEC play. That makes stars that much more vital to success, the last reliable differentiator, and luckily for Georgia, it has one at the most important position. It’s time for Bobo to realize it.