Is Georgia championship good? The answer depends on whether Kirby Smart is right about Mike Bobo
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Kirby Smart stared into the SEC Media Days throng with the healthy cynicism of a wise man whose track record suggests he’s probably right.
A decade into the Kirby Smart reign of terror in the SEC, Smart’s program is in the unusual spot of carrying the SEC’s banner nationally as a perennial championship contender while also serving as an object lesson in the conference’s recent fall from the sport’s summit.
The B1G has won the last 3 national championships, if you are scoring at home, and while a 3-year-and-counting championship drought wouldn’t feel that long in plenty of college towns and leagues in America, the SEC isn’t most places.
Perspective might tell you that a 3+ year national championship drought isn’t that long at the University of Georgia, a place where fans weathered “1980” chants from their nasty reptilian lizard-faced rival fans from the south for 2 decades before Kirby changed the entire conversation.
But as you probably know, we don’t do perspective down South.
Football comes second only to the Sunday gospel, and while we may talk real slow down here, our football fans panic awfully fast.
That’s why even though Georgia has won back-to-back SEC titles, the noise around the program’s results on the field — as opposed to the ongoing speeding car saga perpetually happening off of it — felt louder than usual this offseason.
Back-to-back College Football Playoff exits aren’t just a reason for Dawgs fans to be wary of the city of New Orleans, where both Georgia tragedies have occurred. They are crushing disappointments, a testament to just how much Smart has won since arriving back at his alma mater in 2016.
An optimistic fan might blame luck or the hefty weight of unrealistic expectations.
But optimists don’t grow on trees in the SEC, a league that 2 patron saints of southern sidelines, Steve Spurrier and Nick Saban, earnestly argued was “tougher to win than a national championship,” though it’s unclear if Spurrier was being a smart-aleck or Saban was ingesting rat poison so his team didn’t need to.
Down South, we don’t find rays of sunshine.
We find someone to blame.
For Georgia fans, that someone is offensive coordinator Mike Bobo.
Back-to-back SEC championships sounds great almost anywhere, but at Georgia, where Smart’s made competing for national championships look easy, it’s those College Football Playoff quarterfinal exits that folks remember.
Bobo is the common thread in both quarterfinal losses, and it doesn’t help much that the facts are Bobo is now entering season 11 as an offensive coordinator at Georgia and the program has won exactly 2 SEC titles (2024 and 2025) and 0 national championships with Bobo as a playcaller.
How fair are the criticisms of Bobo? It depends on who answers the questions.
Judging by the annual preseason media poll released Friday afternoon, where Smart’s Bulldogs were picked to win the conference for the third season in a row, the loud fan criticisms of Bobo haven’t soured the bulk of media folks on Georgia’s championship outlook.
At SEC Media Days last week, Smart and the Georgia players in Tampa met questions about their offensive coordinator with responses ranging from delusion to righteous indignation.
Georgia quarterback Gunner Stockton, who now enters his second season as the starting quarterback in Athens, was emphatic in his defense of the coordinator.
“Coach Bobo, I think he gets the best out of everybody. I know he gets the best out of me, and all my teammates because a lot of people have criticism,” Stockton said. “They don’t get to see the day in and day out thing that Coach Bobo does. He barely sleeps during the week, during the game week. But just they don’t see all the work he puts in, the love he has for the university, the love he has for all my teammates and me. I truly don’t think nobody understands how hard he works. And I think he’s the best play caller in the country. And I’m just really excited for this season.”
Stockton threw for 2,894 yards, 24 touchdowns and rushed for another 462 yards and 10 touchdowns a season ago, and Georgia did rank fourth in the country in red-zone scoring efficiency and a respectable 28th in scoring offense.
But a deeper dive into the numbers suggests a Georgia offense under Mike Bobo is less multiple, less efficient, and less successful than the several years that preceded Bobo’s second tenure in Athens.
In the national championship campaign of 2022, the final season of the Todd Monken and Buster Faulkner offensive brain trust, Georgia finished 5th in the country in total offense, fourth in yards gained per play and fourth in offensive success rate (which measures how often any individual play is successful given down and distance).
In fairness, there was no drop off under Bobo in 2023, with the Dawgs again finishing fifth in total offense, fourth in yards per play, and fourth in success rate.
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But years 2 and 3 of the Bobo redux have seen marked decline.
Georgia finished 51st in total offense in 2024, ranking outside of the top 50 nationally in success rate offense as well (54th) for the first time this decade. And 2025 was arguably worse, with Georgia finishing 71st nationally in yards gained per play (5.65) and 65th in success rate offense.
Those 2 seasons mark the worst for a Georgia offense since Year 1 of the Smart era in Athens, when an offense that languished in the bottom of the SEC finished 102nd in total offense and 98th in success rate. Jim Chaney and James Coley quickly righted that ship, helping Georgia to a top 20 total offense and success rate finish in 2017 as Georgia nearly won the national title.
The failures have been the most pronounced in Georgia’s College Football Playoff losses.
In the lopsided loss to Notre Dame in the 2024 quarterfinals, Georgia averaged just 4.9 yards per play and converted just 2 of 15 third and fourth down opportunities.
A year later, in a 39-34 loss to Ole Miss, the Dawgs stormed to a 9-point lead but struggled to move the ball in the second half until a furious rally against a soft Ole Miss defense set up to prevent big plays nearly forced overtime. The loss was hardly the fault of the Georgia offense alone, but the Dawgs averaged just 6.6 yards per pass attempt and a paltry 3.4 yards per rush attempt on the evening, both well under their season averages.
In Tampa, Smart was combative with questions about Bobo, insisting that the play-calling was less of the issue and the problem had more to do with underperforming personnel around him, especially at the wide receiver position.
That’s a fair rebuttal, and it’s a critique Smart astutely made a decade prior, when Chaney and Coley’s first offense in Athens struggled before taking off a year later thanks to a swashbuckling group of playmakers led by Nick Chubb, Sony Michel, Isaac Nauta and others blossoming in their second year in a new system.
Monken had stars too, with perimeter options like Ladd McConkey, George Pickens, and a generational tight end in Brock Bowers forces in the offense.
This makes sense, except for the obvious fact that Georgia, the nation’s most talented team from a talent composite standpoint, has continued to recruit well and when it hits portal, it gets the players it wants.
Despite the arsenal of weapons, Bobo’s offense has struggled for 2 consecutive seasons, under 2 different quarterbacks. What is there to suggest Year 4 will be better?
It’s possible that Gunner Stockton makes a significant leap in his second full season as a starter. That’s what happened with Jake Fromm and Stetson Bennett, and Stockton jumps off film far more than either of those 2 Georgia legends ever did.
But if Stockton is essentially the same player, will Bobo figure out ways to outscheme people and get his talented playmakers the football?
Smart’s won enough to be indignant, relaying trust in Bobo the way a dad on a road trip might dismiss stopping for breakfast anywhere but Waffle House. Sure, there might be better breakfast food somewhere else, but come hell or high water, Waffle House will be open, and getting your eggs hot and your hash browns capped, smothered, and covered is a reliable way to have a delicious breakfast.
“Go ask some of these other coaches around the country—they’d take Mike Bobo in a heartbeat,” Smart told Atlanta radio personality Chuck Oliver last week, also hinting that Bobo’s devotion to Georgia matters immensely.
“(Bobo and I) are worried about the University of Georgia. And we love University of Georgia. And if University of Georgia is a fault, then blame us because we both love University of Georgia and it’s been good to us. Everybody wants somebody else until somebody else is there and they ain’t happy with them.”
Time will tell whether Smart’s contempt for the noise around Bobo is correct.
Loyalty is admirable, and loyalty to Bobo, a longtime servant of the University of Georgia, is especially understandable for Smart, who, heaven willing and that creek don’t rise, will coach in Athens until he retires and eventually be buried in a red and black coffin and lie in state in Athens in a red and black suit and tie.
But too much loyalty can be a weakness, and obvious weakness is something Smart, like SEC giants Steve Spurrier and Nick Saban before him, has rarely shown in the 11 years he’s spent building Georgia into the SEC’s gold standard program.
Mike Bobo has overseen an offense that produces less year after year despite having talent that at least profiles as similar to what Georgia’s played with in the past.
Smart’s earned the right to defend that however he wants for as long as he wants.
How far Georgia goes this season will likely depend on whether Smart’s loyalty to Bobo is misplaced or right on the mark, and wins and losses will decide if Smart is right.
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Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
