Joel Klatt reveals what constitutes successful 2025 season for Georgia
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Joel Klatt watches college football as closely as anybody, and the FOX Sports analyst has watched Georgia take a few steps back since winning back-to-back national titles in 2021 and 2022.
The Bulldogs failed to make the 4-team College Football Playoff in 2023, and then last season an injury to quarterback Carson Beck in the SEC title game was the beginning of the end. Georgia made the 12-team Playoff but was dominated by Notre Dame in the quarterfinals, with Beck missing the game and the Gunner Stockton-led offense not producing enough in the loss.
Well, Stockton is back in Athens to lead Georgia’s offense in 2025, and there is a lot for him and the program to prove this fall. For Klatt, that specifically involves Kirby Smart’s team proving that it is still among the dominant forces in college football.
Klatt is looking far ahead in that regard to the Playoff and where he feels Georgia needs to get in order to maintain that dominant label and claim a successful season.
“Let’s say Georgia does the same thing they did a year ago except they don’t win the SEC. That would be the third straight year they did not play in the national semifinals. Which means there would be a cycle of elite recruits that have entered (college football) and gone to the NFL since Georgia won the national championship. … Kirby Smart has got to get back to that (national semifinal) bar. This is a huge year for them. They’re trying to replace a quarterback and other things on the roster. Whether they can get back there, I don’t know,” explained Klatt on his college football podcast on Wednesday.
Here is the full clip of Klatt’s take on Georgia this fall:
We won’t know for several months whether Stockton was up to the task in leading Georgia back to the precipice of a national title, or whether those other roster holes were filled properly.
Klatt and the college football world will be watching closely.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
