’There’s a perception among Georgia fans that this team simply hasn’t shown enough to indicate that it’s up to the task of a third straight national championship run. I had a text exchange with a particularly emotional friend over the weekend, during which I told him that I thought he just wanted to be mad about the Bulldogs’ performance against unranked Vanderbilt.

“I wanna win the natty,” he wrote back, “and this ain’t gonna get it done.”

He’s right. The play we’ve seen from this Georgia football team up to this point has not been good enough to win a championship this season. It has been inconsistent. There have been gaps on the defensive side of the football with too many big plays allowed. There have been inopportune turnovers and failures to put games away.

All of this is true.

But I want to take a quick trip through time to remind the Bulldogs faithful of a Georgia team that struggled for a large chunk of the first half of the season before finding a way to put its foot on the gas once it got into the meat of its schedule.

Let’s enter our time machines and go back all the way to the year 2022. It was a different world then: Taylor Swift was on top of the music world, inflation was high and the Dallas Cowboys thought they finally had a team capable of winning a Super Bowl (until being humbled by much better teams).

Okay, maybe not so different. Let’s do a quick comparison of some games:

2022: Win over No. 11 Oregon 49-3
2023: Win over No. 20 Kentucky 51-13

These games happened at different points in the first half, with Georgia opening against Oregon in 2022 and playing Kentucky 6 weeks in. Still, both demonstrated something about their respective teams: Put the Bulldogs against a perceived top opponent, and you get the Bulldogs’ top performance.

2022: Win over Kent State 39-22
2023: Win over Vanderbilt 37-20

They were wins against poor teams. Georgia led Kent State just 19-13 at halftime. Similarly, Vanderbilt had gotten within 30-20 in the fourth quarter against the Bulldogs on Saturday. Was there ever really a threat that Georgia might lose either game? Absolutely not. Still, they were up-and-down performances against poor teams.

2022: Win over Missouri 26-22
2023: Win over Auburn 27-20

Both games required some late-game heroics to avoid the upset. Both were against teams that have some solid players but have no business being in a game with Georgia’s talented roster. Both may have helped Georgia recognize some flaws and also become just a little more battletested than it would have been otherwise.

2022: Win over Samford 33-0
2023: Win over UAB 49-21

FCS teams Georgia blew out but looked average in the process of doing so.

2022: Win over Auburn 42-10
2023: Win over South Carolina 24-14

Sleepy first halves that turn around in the third quarter. The Bulldogs pulled away more a year ago, but the formula was the same.

The comparisons could go on: High passing yards from the teams’ quarterbacks, Stetson Bennett and Carson Beck, but struggles to convert those into trips to the end zone. Rushing attacks that have shown promise, but held back at times by injury. Missing key wide receivers for chunks of time due to injury.

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The Bulldogs struggled to rush the passer — until they needed to in a dominant win against Tennessee.

They struggled to prevent the big play — until they needed to in a cold and windy showdown against Kentucky on the road.

Against perceived mid- and lower-tier teams a year ago, Georgia struggled to put an exclamation point in its wins that would convince people it had what it took to win a second consecutive national title. Until it played the top teams and reminded everyone why it had won the title the year before in the first place.

People look at the sum of the parts of Georgia’s 2022 season and mentally block out the struggles it had for the better part of 9 weeks. We look at the 15-0 season and the 65-7 blowout in the College Football Playoff national championship game and forget that there was a lot of so-so play mixed in throughout the year.

None of this is to say the same script is being written in 2023. The eye test does, indeed, tell us that something is lacking a bit in these games, particularly on the defensive side of the ball. It appears, perhaps, a step slower and lacks a player like Jordan Davis or Jalen Carter in the middle of the defensive line. Fewer gang tackles. Fewer contested passes.

There are certainly things that need to be improved upon.

But the message of the day is: This season is 15 games if you make it all the way to the end. Georgia is through 7. And the 7 it has played this year simply aren’t that different from the first 7 it played a year ago.