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There’s an easy story which explains Georgia’s fall-off, and we’ve leaned on it a little too much. That narrative goes like this:
For years, Georgia’s football program has lacked discipline. This was most evident off the field, with what we’ll lightly term “the car stuff.” As often happens when discipline’s lacking off the field, it eventually became a problem between the sidelines as well. Kirby Smart’s early seasons were hallmarked by inconsistency and a big-game inability to finish the job. After the back-to-back titles and accompanying vehicular mayhem, those problems reared their heads again. 2023’s Georgia Bulldogs allowed all of South Carolina, Auburn, and Georgia Tech to play them within ten points. Two of those teams finished with losing records, and none won more than seven games. This year, Georgia let Kentucky, Mississippi State, and (again) Georgia Tech hang around. Again, there are two losing records in that group, and the best team among them finished 7–6.
The argument against this narrative goes that plenty of teams struggle with plenty of opponents. The problem with this argument is that Georgia was never “plenty of teams.” Georgia annually boasts one of the most athletically dominant rosters in the country. Georgia knows its SEC opponents and Georgia Tech inside and out. Georgia was supposed to keep building upon its historically dominant two-year run.
Instead? Georgia spent most of this year wheeling between unbeatable and lackadaisical. An assumption formed that they could show up when it mattered, but the near-debacle against Georgia Tech challenged that faith tradition. Against Notre Dame, believers expected Georgia to run all over the Irish and bully Mike Denbrock’s offense into submission. Then, Notre Dame had an easier time against Georgia’s run game than it did against Penn State’s. Then, Riley Leonard spent the fourth quarter showcasing his physical gifts over demoralized Georgia defenders. It was supposed to be the other way around.
To be fair to Georgia, the Dawgs were missing their starting quarterback. To also be fair, that quarterback was so frustrating all fall that many seriously asked if the Bulldogs would be better with his backup.
Turnovers and dropped passes were the story coming out of that Sugar Bowl defeat, and without the turnovers and dropped passes, the game would have seen a dramatic finish. But without the turnovers and dropped passes, Georgia wouldn’t have necessarily won. Georgia did not overpower Notre Dame only to lose the game with poor handles. Georgia and Notre Dame competed evenly with one another in the trenches. The little things did the Dawgs in, but it was failure in the big things which made those little things matter. It wasn’t a momentary failure, either, an unfortunately timed breakdown. It happened all season, in spurts which became long stretches. Everyone saw it. Georgia was a one-point pregame underdog when markets closed.
Discipline goes a long way towards fixing the little things. But what if Georgia has bigger problems than drops?
Four questions for Smart’s program in 2025, with one big answer at the bottom:
1. Does Kirby Smart Need Better Assistants?
Here’s the thing we’ve tip-toed around, and the thing we probably should have noticed sooner:
Dan Lanning worked at Georgia for four years.
Todd Monken worked at Georgia for three.
Will Muschamp was a co-defensive coordinator for two.
None of these three men currently occupy coordinator positions in Athens.
Georgia’s talent level this season doesn’t need to be described. We should see ten separate Dawgs drafted in April, if not eleven or twelve. As of right now, nine more are projected to go in the first three rounds alone in ’26. Personnel was not the problem for Georgia, no matter how specifically “unnamed sources” are throwing wide receivers under the bus. It’s easy to point to poor discipline and inconsistency as signs of a poor culture, and they are indeed signs of that, and Texas has proven repeatedly these last 15 years how far downwards culture can drag talent. But what if Georgia’s issues this year went beyond players showing up to work and players knowing how to focus within games? What if a lot of this was the other sides of coaching? What if it was the tangibles—talent development, and x’s and o’s?
This isn’t some novel revelation. A fair share of Georgia fans start convulsing if you mention Mike Bobo’s name. But what if they’re right? What if Bobo was a problem for this year’s offense? And what if Glenn Schumann—who just finished his first season as solo defensive coordinator after years of sharing the job—isn’t getting it done on the defensive side? What if the issue is indeed personnel, but personnel on the sidelines, not personnel on the field?
Again, this isn’t exactly new. The default move for a fanbase happy with their head coach but unhappy with their team is to find a coordinator whose head fits on a stake. If it’s true, though, it’s a big deal. Because if it’s true, it doesn’t say anything that significant about Mike Bobo and Glenn Schuman. If it’s true, it says something very significant about Kirby Smart.
Until Monday night, only two active college football coaches have won a national championship. Each has won two. One of them has seen his star crash and burn, to the point where the thought of his alma mater wanting him last offseason was laughed off the table. The other is still roundly respected as one of the best in the country at his craft.
What if Kirby Smart and Dabo Swinney have the same problem?
The cracks formed for Swinney before Brent Venables and Tony Elliott left. Off-field stuff taints Swinney’s legacy as well, namely the still-unexplained positive PED tests after a run built on bewildering speed and strength from three and four-star recruits. But with Swinney, we saw a notable coordinator’s departure (Jeff Scott’s) predate a dramatic downturn in performance even as talent levels rose. Are we seeing the same thing with Smart regarding Lanning’s departure, Monken’s departure, and Muschamp’s step towards retirement?
I don’t know whether this is or isn’t the case. With the rest of these questions, we usually provide some sort of answer, but I don’t have any answer for this one. Maybe Kirby Smart’s the best coach in the country. Maybe he’s a highly effective coach who struggles to maintain discipline on a young professional football team. Maybe he’s Dabo Swinney with a lot less goof. Maybe Clemson’s about to roar back to prominence and comparisons to Dabo Swinney will become a good thing again. I really don’t know.
It’s possible, though, that Kirby Smart is a problem for Georgia. If he is, he and Georgia are of one body now. If he is, we won’t see these guys in another national title game for a long, long time.
2. Will the offensive line be okay?
Georgia’s offensive line this year was large, talented, and only mediumly effective. Georgia’s offensive line next year will be large, talented, and very green. Four starters are headed to the NFL, and sometimes-starter Earnest Greene III is also considered a potential mid-round pick. (I don’t believe Greene has indicated whether he’s coming back or going pro.) That leaves Monroe Freeling and possibly Greene as the only returning contributors from this year’s line. Again, this year’s line produced at a much lower level than the sum of its parts would imply.
Maybe it works out just fine. Maybe it starts out poorly but the guys learn each other and round into form as the year goes on. But at the most important position group in college football, Georgia’s turning over bigtime. That’s a bigger deal than the transition from Carson Beck to Gunner Stockton.
3. Can you put a price on identity?
Speaking of Stockton!
Can he breathe some life into this place?
The argument in Stockton’s favor goes like this: Stockton was a more highly-touted recruit than Beck. Stockton’s always appeared to like football more than Beck, a former basketball recruit who conducts himself more like a college basketball player than a quintessential Bulldogs quarterback. Stockton grew up in Rabun County, the Peach State’s northeastern corner. Stockton’s grandfather died at a Florida–Georgia game. Stockton is a quintessential Georgia quarterback, more Georgia by birth than Matthew Stafford or Aaron Murray ever was.
Does that matter? Maybe so. If Georgia’s problems really do all tie back to intangibles, that’s an area where a quarterback can make a legitimate difference.
4. How many people have to die?
And then, again, there is the car stuff. What does this summer hold for the roadways of Clarke County?
To be fair to Smart, players and staffers killing people in motor vehicles is not a problem unique to Georgia. It just (allegedly) happened at LSU. It happened with an Alabama product three years ago. But Georgia is the face of the issue, and it’s a big issue. Reckless and/or drunk driving in the football world keeps picking people off. More people are going to die if Smart and other football leaders don’t get the problem under control. Is it a problem in places other than Athens? Yes. But it’s a problem at Georgia, too, and even in the most transactional, football-focused sense, it’s one of the biggest threats to the success of Georgia’s football program. Until it’s solved and we know it’s solved, it is at all times the most important question regarding Georgia’s football program. Right now, it remains one of the biggest questions regarding Georgia’s ability to win, too.
The Answer
Among the SEC’s three uber-talented programs, Georgia seems to enjoy the least upside for 2025. Both Alabama and Texas have higher ceilings this fall than Georgia’s, and the schedule does the Dawgs few favors. Two of their first three games come against Tennessee and Alabama, with the Tennessee game in Knoxville. They get to host Mississippi and Texas, but they have to travel to a possibly competitive Auburn and to a Georgia Tech team that continues to give them hell. There’s reason for optimism about Florida. That’s a reason for pessimism about Georgia. Only six of the Bulldogs’ twelve games are clear victories. Split the other half of the year, and they’ll need help to make the playoff cut.
Can Georgia win the SEC? Yes. Can Georgia win the national championship? Yes. Will one of these SEC programs probably pop off, exceed expectations, and contend for a title? Yes. When there are three that are this talented, that’s three separate chances for one to make good. But at a national level, we’re looking at another fairly open landscape. Part of this is that as we said with Texas, it doesn’t really look like 2025 is The Year for the Georgia Bulldogs.
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This was the third of our little offseason look-ins at noteworthy programs. If you missed the first two, here are our thoughts on Penn State and Texas. Tomorrow, we’re planning to tackle Oregon unless significant developments elsewhere alter our timeline.
In news, Quinn Ewers officially declared for the NFL Draft, cutting off the biggest possible angle for portal chaos. Still no mention of his oblique and ankle in the standard media writeups, so maybe our theories were wrong there. We do have one odd development, though: Media’s spending a lot of time defending Ewers’s Texas legacy. There seems to be a little shadow war going on between Ewers’s camp and Texas fans. It’s doubtful this comes from Ewers personally (and to be clear—we authentically think Ewers is a good player who should be the third quarterback drafted), but it’s fitting that Ewers leaves college football as he entered, surrounded by strategists and schemers. One other inside baseball note on college football media in a minute. We’ll finish with the football first.
The other college football news is that James Madison added two transfer quarterbacks: Rising junior Camden Coleman, who just had a solid season at Richmond, and…*drum roll*…Bob Chesney’s old field general, Matthew Sluka himself. As always with Sluka, we can at least promise this: It’ll be a great time to watch.
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Ok, the other inside baseball thing with media: The reason media doesn’t make a bigger deal out of the automotive fatalities is that coaches are perceived as highly sensitive to this kind of criticism, and coaches are capable of cutting off college football journalists’ access to everything from inside information to sitting in the press box itself. College football journalists are terrified of college football coaches.
In professional sports, coaches don’t have that kind of power. In professional sports, coaches are fairer game. Any criticism like this in college ball, though, tends to be broad, restrained, and/or consciously combative. Or so goes the prevailing, largely unspoken industry thought. This is why there was never any serious reporting on Clemson’s ostarine scandal. This is why the Chandler LeCroy crash was covered so differently from the Henry Ruggs crash. This is why so many coaches are almost unanimously lionized and then, at once, almost unanimously turned upon.
Should journalists be this scared of coaches? Probably not. But that’s easy for us to say. We don’t have the kind of access they do.
Anyway, this is why no one covers the car stuff all that seriously. Legacy media’s scared to cover it, and we aren’t in a position where we have any credibility to blame them. Hopefully we get a big investigative ESPN piece about it this offseason, something in the vein of Outside the Lines that can vet a lot of sources and cast a broad net on the institutional factors driving the deadly phenomenon. It’s a huge deal. It needs more attention.
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