The greatest part about the new college football world we find ourselves in was on full display Saturday night in Athens.

SEC heavyweights Tennessee and Georgia were teeing off on each other for 60 solid minutes inside the blinky-lighted madhouse that was Sanford Stadium.

Plenty of drama and plenty of great plays on both sides of the football were being made by a bushel of NFL-ready talent.

Millions of sets of eyeballs were fixed nationwide on the proceedings, and every play felt like the consequences attached were off the charts.

Despite all that, at the end of the evening after the madhouse emptied into the cool Georgia gloaming, very little was actually decided.

Welcome to the new world.

The scoreboard glowed thusly: No. 12 Georgia 31, No. 7 Tennessee 17. But with a dozen College Football Playoff spots in the offing – not to mention berths in the Southeastern Conference championship game – neither the Bulldogs nor the Volunteers locked up anything for themselves … other than a chance to play another week of meaningful football.

That’s because both Georgia and Tennessee now have 2 losses. And from what little we have actually been able to determine amid the histrionic talking heads and hokey insurance company-sponsored “Playoff Predictor” nonsense, both teams are still theoretically eligible for both the SEC crown and a spot to play for the big enchilada.

Don’t get it too twisted. Saturday was a huge statement win for Georgia, and proved that coach Kirby Smart absorbed yet another trait from mentor Nick Saban: He simply doesn’t lose after losing. Instead, the Dawgs stood up, strapped on their hobnail boots, and broke some Tennessee noses to the delight of the home faithful.

Georgia had the most to give away entering Saturday night, having lost already to Alabama and Ole Miss in what has already been a madcap SEC season. That meant the Dawgs had zero wiggle room to stumble again despite a third matchup within the conference against a top-10 team.

Tennessee, meanwhile, was a nose ahead courtesy of only carrying 1 loss into Athens – a 19-14 setback to Arkansas on Oct. 6 – and boasting a cigar-torching victory against the Crimson Tide that Georgia couldn’t accomplish.

But now? Good luck trying to figure out where Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama or darn near anyone outside of Oregon (which almost lost to Wisconsin but remained unbeaten) will end up in this week’s Playoff rankings.

Not that Saturday was wholly unproductive. Aside from Georgia apparently ramping up its fireworks budget to keep up with their corn-from-a-jar enjoyers from the north, the Dawgs’ victory was a referendum on the quarterbacking talent that is Carson Beck.

Considered early on to be a Heisman candidate and still a first-round NFL Draft prospect, Beck was starting to get dinged a bit during Georgia’s meandering up and down the national polls. Saturday, though, Beck was very strong – going 25-of-40 for 347 yards, throwing 2 TD passes to little-targeted tight end Oscar Delp and rushing for another score.

Not that his Volunteers counterpart, redshirt freshman Nico Iamaleava, was a slouch by any stretch. Just a week after encountering what Tennessee called “concussion-like symptoms” against Mississippi State, Iamaleava wasn’t even a cinch to play against Georgia until Saturday – but he answered the bell with 167 passing yards and not a whole lot of mistakes.

Smart, a coach who hadn’t lost a regular-season SEC game in 42 outings before Alabama turned the Dawgs back 41-34, was also facing just a smidge of existential crisis against Tennessee. Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss Rebels further exposed Georgia’s weaknesses just the week before in Oxford – making every decision Smart contemplated Saturday night rife with consequence.

A single wrong move by Georgia would mean irrelevance for the remainder of 2024, and likely a batch of opt-out defections similar to what the Bulldogs saw from FSU in the wake of the Seminoles’ missing the 4-team Playoff race last season.

Despite operating without a safety net, Smart and the Dawgs pushed all the right buttons to win their 8th straight against Tennessee and improve to 8-1 against the Vols with Smart patrolling betwixt the hedges. It certainly helped that Athens After Dark was electric, a non-stop woofing din that tested Tennessee eardrums and forced offensive linemen to twitch early a couple times in key situations.

Georgia’s coup de grace Saturday came at the end, just as Smart had hoped all week long by opining that the tougher team in the 4th quarter would win. First, the Dawgs’ defense forced Tennessee to punt trailing 24-17 with 8:47 to play. Taking over at its own 8, Beck and Georgia calmly marched 92 back-breaking yards over an equally back-breaking 6:21 – icing it with a Nate Frazier 2-yard touchdown plunge.

That gave Georgia its 29th straight home victory, a win that saw Tennessee record only 8 first downs and fail to score in the final 30 minutes.

In the final analysis, alas, Saturday night wasn’t all that dissimilar to Friday night’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson bout: a truckload of pomp and circumstance, a clear winner and a clear loser, but still questions about what was accomplished.

Both Georgia and Tennessee are still vying for 1 of the 12 Playoff Golden Tickets with 2 regular-season games remaining – with Georgia’s resume seemingly better on all scorecards. That said, a world-class statistician armed with algorithms and fancy charts still can’t possibly predict what will happen – either to the Bulldogs, Volunteers or the approximately 40 other teams that could make a case for a Playoff spot.

Welcome to the new world.