There haven’t been many losses since Kirby Smart took over the Georgia football program in 2016. Smart is 97-17 in his 144 games, and his team’s Week 5 41-34 loss to Alabama broke a streak of 42-straight regular season wins. It was the first regular-season loss since the Bulldogs fell to Florida on November 7, 2020.
It’s been incredibly difficult for any team in the SEC, or any league for that matter, to beat the Bulldogs under Smart, but it gets even tougher when Smart’s team is coming off a rare loss. During his tenure, Georgia is 13-3 after a loss and hasn’t dropped back-to-back regular-season games since Smart’s first season in 2016 when he did it twice. In that 8-5 season, the Bulldogs lost to Ole Miss and Tennessee back-to-back, and then later to Vanderbilt and Florida in consecutive games.
If you remove the 2016 season, clearly the outlier of the Smart era, Georgia is 10-1 after a loss under Smart. That’s a win percentage of .909 which is even better than his career win percentage of .851 and Georgia’s .881 win percentage since 2017.
The last time that Georgia lost back-to-back games, the two losses came a month apart, first to No. 1 Alabama in the 2018 SEC Championship game on December 1, then to No. 14 Texas in the 2019 Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day.
Even after last week’s loss to Alabama, Georgia is still the No. 5 team in the country and a 24.5-point favorite at home against the 2-3 Auburn Tigers. Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze desperately needs a statement win for his program, but he’s unlikely to get it on Saturday afternoon in Athens.