Game of the Week: Georgia (-2.5) at Alabama

There are people out there who are convinced, and who will try to convince you, that in the era of Playoff expansion, games like this one don’t mean quite as much as they used to — that the CFP looms too large over the regular season; that the only games really matter now are the ones in December and January, eclipsing everything else; that the sport is somehow diminished by the fact that a single loss is no longer enough to automatically put a national contender’s championship ambitions in the freezer. They’re out there. Some of them are probably reading this.

They might even have a point, as far as it goes, about just how relentlessly and inescapably the Playoff is hyped as the season wears on, seeping into every crevice all the way down to random Wednesday night games in the Sun Belt with zero CFP ramifications whatsoever.

Where UGA/Bama is concerned, though, come Saturday night I would just ask the skeptics this: When they’re counting down to the kickoff, in real time, does the scene feel smaller than it used to? The stakes lower, somehow? When 1 of the 2 Heisman-caliber quarterbacks in this game trots out with the game on the line and one last drive to win it in the fourth quarter, are you thinking about the implications for December and January? When one of them is choking up in the post-game interview, a winner in one of the hardest-fought games of his life, while the other is limping off with a towel draped over his head to obscure his face, does it mean less?

In fact, the final score in Tuscaloosa does have long-term Playoff implications, big ones. No, the loser is not eliminated on the spot, any more than Georgia was when it lost to Alabama en route to winning the national title in 2022, or Bama was in any of the years (2011, 2012, 2015, 2017) when it rebounded from a regular-season loss to win it all under the banner of the CFP and the BCS.

But both teams do face tough schedules ahead, and the margin for error for the loser shrinks dramatically. Alabama still faces road trips to Tennessee, LSU and Oklahoma, plus Missouri at home; Georgia still has to play at Texas and Ole Miss, and hosts the Vols in the most booby-trapped slate of Kirby Smart‘s tenure, by far.

Beyond merely making the cut, there’s also the matter of seeding, a novel concern: Only the eventual conference champion is eligible for a first-round bye in the 12-team format, and the winner on Saturday night moves to the inside lane in that race. Win or lose, there is no chance of either team coming out on the other side feeling like it can afford to shift into cruise control until after the weather turns, which has certainly not always been the case in the past.

But the skeptics are right: The Playoff is not everything, and there’s so much we miss if we allow it to define the scope of our vision. In a game like this, the past looms every bit as large as the future. Alabama and Georgia have been playing football for more than 120 years, and building up the kind of cross-border blood feud that can only exist between neighbors from Day 1. In all that time, this weekend marks just the 5th time they’ve met in the regular season with both teams ranked in the AP top 10. (It’s happened 6 times in the postseason, all since 2012.)

Georgia has won 42 straight regular-season games, and 16 straight true road games since an October 2020 loss… at Alabama. The Dawgs’ most recent loss came at the hands of the Crimson Tide, in a 27-24 upset last December that knocked Georgia out of the CFP and ushered Bama in, as did the one before that, in the 2021 SEC Championship Game. Altogether, the Tide have accounted for 5 of UGA’s 7 losses over the past 7 years, beginning with Tua Tagovailoa coming off the bench to lead a miraculous comeback in January 2018. The fact that Georgia snapped its four-decade championship drought by returning the favor 4 years later only made the triumph that much sweeter.

All of that comes to bear on Saturday night, in front of 100,000 people of questionable sanity and sobriety, in a collision of the two most talented rosters in the college game. In any context, Dawgs/Tide represents the pinnacle of the sport in its current era. That won’t be the case forever. But as long as it is, every chapter deserves to be savored on its own terms.

The stat: 32.5 yards

That’s the average distance of Alabama’s 19 touchdowns this season with Jalen Milroe in the lineup, 14 of which Milroe has accounted for himself (8 passing, 6 rushing). Including garbage time, Bama is the only team in the SEC that has scored the majority of its total touchdowns from outside of the red zone.

Big plays were the one aspect missing from last year’s upset win over Georgia in the SEC title game. Alabama’s touchdown drives in that game were methodical: 92 yards in 10 plays; 69 yards in 9 plays; 75 yards in 9 plays. The Tide’s longest gain of the game, a 30-yard run by Milroe, came on their final possession as they attempted (successfully) to run out the clock. His longest completion came courtesy of a wheel route the RB Jamarion Miller took 28 yards for Bama’s first touchdown. Milroe was just 2-for-6 on attempts of 20+ air yards, the strongest area of his game over the course of the season, and into this season as well.

Last year’s resident deep threats, Jermaine Burton and Isaiah Bond, departed for the NFL Draft and the Texas Longhorns, respectively. In their place, the Tide have plugged in precocious speedster Ryan Williams, a 17-year-old true freshman who clearly made the right call in skipping his senior year of high school to get a head start on campus. Four of Williams’ 10 receptions and 3 of his 4 touchdowns in the early going have come on receptions of 20+ air yards, yielding an average of 54.3 yards per catch on downfield grabs.

Of course, taking the lid off against Georgia is an entirely different challenge than going long against Western Kentucky or Wisconsin, especially with the best deep safety in the country, Malaki Starks, patrolling the back end. As a team, UGA has allowed just 1 completion of 20+ yards and has yet to give up a touchdown from any distance. If there’s any combination in America more capable of striking lightning than Milroe and Williams, though, I’m not sure who it is.

The big question: Is Georgia’s offense OK?

The Dawgs legitimately struggled in the their Week 3 win at Kentucky, finishing with 262 yards on 4.9 per play and failing to score a touchdown until the fourth quarter. (They also lost arguably their best offensive player, senior OL Tate Ratledge, to an ankle injury that will sideline him until at least midseason.) Combined with their sluggish first half against Clemson in the opener, they’ve been held out of the end zone in 5 of 8 quarters vs. Power 4 opponents.

Saturday night is a big game for Carson Beck, who depending on who you ask is either a legitimate first-round prospect or merely a product of ideal circumstances. If last year’s game elevated Milroe, it had the opposite effect for Beck, relegating him to “can he win the big one?” purgatory until, well, he wins a big one. Beck was 21-for-29 for 243 yards against the Tide, but didn’t throw for a touchdown, didn’t make much of a dent downfield (1-for-5 on attempts of 20+ air yards), and generally looked nondescript until mustering up a couple of late, futile TD drives in the fourth quarter.

His most memorable play of the day was the game’s only turnover, a botched exchange with a would-be ball carrier late in the third, which put Bama in the driver’s seat; a chip-shot field goal extended the Tide’s lead to 10 points, and eventually proved to be the winning margin. Just as Beck seemed to be ascending to the Heisman tier, he looked like just a guy. Winning in Tuscaloosa — where the only opposing QBs to win in the past 15 years are Cam Newton (2010), Johnny Manziel (2012), Joe Burrow (2019), and Quinn Ewers (2023) — and any lingering doubts about Beck’s big-game prowess will be memory holed in short order.

One silver lining in the win at Kentucky was the emergence of a couple of skill players, RB Trevor Etienne (90 total yards on 20 touches) and WR Dominic Lovett (6 catches for 89 yards), as the go-to back and receiver, respectively, which Georgia has not really had over the past few seasons due to its preference to spread the ball around as liberally as possible. Depending on your perspective, that can be read as an endorsement of Etienne and Lovett or an indictment of the rest of the surrounding cast, which came up bone-dry. There’s an abundance of options, but the Bulldogs are still trying to identify the real week-in, week-out dudes.

The key matchup: Alabama RT Elijah Pritchett vs. Georgia Edge Jalon Walker

Walker was a beast in the last matchup against Bama, finishing as Georgia’s most productive defender despite logging just 12 snaps on defense, per Pro Football Focus. On those handful of plays, he registered 5 QB pressures and 2 sacks, turning up the heat both as an edge rusher and as a spy to prevent Milroe from escaping the pocket. I love this play, in particular, which begins with Walker (No. 11) aggressively signaling for the wide receiver at the top of the formation to go in motion before Milroe does, and ends with Walker hawking down Milroe in the open field for the first of his 2 sacks.

https://twitter.com/JeffreyThumser/status/1762865802363953329/

Walker has been Georgia’s most disruptive presence in the early going, if only due to the absence of aspiring first-rounder Mykel Williams, who is listed as questionable to play Saturday due to an ankle injury that sidelined him for the previous 2 games. (“Mykel is gonna be close,” Kirby Smart told reporters.) The pass rush was arguably Georgia’s biggest question mark coming into the season, and still ranks at or near the top of the list.

On the other side, though, pass protection has been the biggest red flag for Alabama, which is still having nightmares about its Week 2 meltdown against South Florida. As a unit, Bama’s o-line was flagged for 8 penalties and allowed 3 sacks in a game that was much closer than the 42-13 final implied. The front looked vastly better in Week 3 against Wisconsin, largely due to return of both starting tackles, Pritchett on the right and Kadyn Proctor on the left, after missing all or most of the USF game with minor injuries; Milroe faced pressure on just 4 of his 18 drop-backs and the Tide weren’t flagged on a pass-blocking down. Georgia cannot allow them to finish with another clean sheet.

The verdict: Alabama 29, Georgia 23

Time will tell if the Kirby/Saban dynamic that has defined this rivalry goes in the books as the main theme, or merely as one chapter in a longer-running story. There is no personal history between Smart and Kalen DeBoer, whom SEC fans are still just getting to know. One thing that is already clear, though, is that expectations have not changed: The notion that the Crimson Tide might regress into some kind of post-Saban malaise went out the window when they won their first game of the DeBoer era 63-0. There is no setting in Tuscaloosa other than championship-or-bust. So far, this team and its bellcow of a quarterback look up to it. One way or the other, we’re about to find out.