Let’s face it, the important question about Georgia is whether the South Carolina game was a one-off experience for the offense, or a sign of deeper problems that are likely to rear their head as the Dawgs roll into the toughest part of their regular season schedule.
The team votes for the former, of course.
Senior running back Brian Herrien can provide a boost to Georgia’s offense, but he missed the South Carolina game with back spasms. He said that afternoon was an anomaly.
“I feel like it was just one game,” Herrien said. “We have to execute, of course … Watching that game, sometimes we weren’t focused enough, or sometimes we were complacent about who we were or what we were doing.”
The head coach doesn’t sound like he’s in total agreement, though.
When asked about the offensive woes and offensive coordinator James Coley’s performance, Smart deflects. He cites the lack of explosive plays, turnover margin and other metrics the Bulldogs watch closely.
But even Smart hedges.
Against Kentucky and South Carolina, the Bulldogs’ flaws were exposed. After a collapse against the Gamecocks and an ugly win over the Wildcats, the offense has offered more concern than confidence. Georgia ranks No. 62 nationally in passing offense.
“I think 50% of [the passing woes against Kentucky] would be due to conditions,” Smart said in a teleconference on Oct. 23. “It was the biggest struggle. It was just tough for anybody to palm a ball and throw a ball and effectively catch it.”
Sounds like the makings for a good, simple reader poll, so here goes nothing.
Comments, as always, are welcome.
Get The Picture 
How about both? Or maybe coaches failed game planning. Otherwise Dawgs should’ve crushed them by huge margin
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Both is the obvious answer, so as with most online polling, the results are invalid.
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Without the turnovers we win by 2 – 3 touchdowns. But turnovers are part of the game. We still should have beat SC with a 4 TO deficit. If we have a 1 or 2 TO deficit against FU we’re in big trouble. No TO’s and we win IMO, but it should be a good ‘un.
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yep….but all 4 of those turnovers were on the players (SC). One was on the center, two were on the receivers & 1 was on Fromm.
The question for me is, do the players get better before the season ends. Not confident about Hill, not completely confident about the recievers. But a healthy Cager does make them a better team.
Even given all of that, in a tight game..I am not confident at all with the staff with situational play calling (too many examples)…..and I think that is ALL on Kirby.
This game will tell a lot….
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Hill and pretty much all the receivers outside of Cager are young though, especially Pickens, who has really good numbers while a true freshman. Fred Gibson didn’t break out until the Kentucky game his freshman year.
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Fred Gibson, the “Waycross Wonder”. Probably my favorite all-time receiver, definitely one of them.
Was thinking his breakout game was his first as a starter, the Tennessee game (Hobnail). Can remember he and Greene connected on a LONG one…it was beautiful. Could be wrong though, could have been Kentucky.
Yeah, I guess youth can be a factor. But all programs go through the same. This is Kirby’s fourth year…..and I don’t think next year gets any better, especially if we lose Fromm.
The offensive side scares me. Seems as though we are not getting the difference makers that we use to get.
A few have also got out of state also (offense & defense). Only having 4 commitments so far from the great state of Georgia is alarming
to me.
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Richt didnt know whether to play frosh or not in 2001 … so Fred did not see the field until the hobnail game. If Richt had played him earlier, we would have won the SC game. Two circus catches in the Tenn game told us what we had in Fred. And soon after he had that 200-plus yard day at Lexington.
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I would laugh, laugh, and laugh some more if Fromm goes pro and we somehow pick up Gatewood from the transfer portal.
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Could be right, losing just seems to magnify things.
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Meant for WH below:
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Hill has me worried, he needs help on Saturday, and again in AU.
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Greg… The only sentence you had to write was, “But a healthy Cager does make them a better team”…..
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First statement is dead on, and the only thing that needs to be said. UGA almost 500 yards of offense, twice the number of 1st downs, a 50% edge in rushing, and dominated time of possession…and a majority of voters chose exposure of offense over 4-0 in turnovers? I hope it means that many people just hit the wrong button.
Only exposure I saw on the offense was needed work to get receivers off press man-to-man coverage, and a center that needs help with a strong NG on him. But that game was dominated by UGA on every measurement except scoreboard and turnovers (which totally caused the scoreboard shortage,) SMH
That doesn’t mean I like our offensive plan, or Kirby’s choice of OC hire last December. But it does say that you folks are letting the result of one game cloud your ability to analyze what happened in that game. Did that game, along with the last 2 1/2 quarters of the Vandy game, and our sputtering in the ND game show we aren’t as consistent as we expected on offense, and that our OL is not the behemoth it was projected to be? Yes, but that wasn’t the SC game, we have been looking flawed before that, SC was about the turnovers, pure and simple.
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Mac, go back to the first two offensive plays against Notre Dame. After the second ay I thought to myself that good DBs would pick passes like that off, but it wasn’t until I just rewatched them that I saw how close it actually came to getting picked.
With the passing plays we have, they essentially HAVE to play perfect, or shit will blow up quickly. One missed step, one wrong turn, and it’s essentially a jump ball. To me, that is a flaw, and defensive coaches are scheming around it. We’ve simply got too many weapons IDGAS if they’re freshmen, for Jake to be throwing “contested passes” so much of the time.
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I vote Yes and No. Without the turnovers, UGA wins that game easily just due to sheer talent disparity. But they did turn the ball over. When it became apparent that they couldn’t dominate with the run like they wanted to, they turned to the pass to move the ball, and that exposed some weaknesses both in play-calling and personnel and, in my opinion, overall philosophy.
The latter won’t change under Kirby Smart. The personnel can improve their execution (better snaps, catching the ball, getting Cager back, better WR blocking(?!), etc.), and Coley can mix up the play-calling to a degree. Pretty much, they are what they are. If they can win the line of scrimmage, not turn the ball over, and prevent the opponent from making big plays, they will be able to win most SEC games. If they fail at any of those, there is no plan B.
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Lack of Plan B is what concerns me the most.
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According to Dawgnation, Jake Fromm said yesterday “the Bulldogs plan to stay true to their offensive identity coming out of the bye week.’We know what we do, we’re going to play physical, we’re going to be disciplined, we’re going to make plays, we want to be explosive.’” So, apparently the plan is the same, only we’re going to do it better, do it faster, do it more effectively. Could be a long afternoon. Or, we could actually do it better, do it faster, do it more effectively. Hope springs eternal.
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It all kind of feels like we’re talking in circles (player execution vs. play-calling vs. philosophy), so I’ll just say “can Georgia make them pay through the air for cheating to stop the run?’ If we can’t, then they’ll stop the run with impunity and the whole house of cards falls down.
I think we need to connect on at least one devastating vertical passing route early and get a few big pops on crossing routes early. Basically, what we have struggled at lately. Pass to run and force Grantham to send in his patented WTF-is-the-call confusing audibles. Every time we get a first down or go above the success rate on a given down we need to go up tempo.
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What’s a crossing route? Asking for Coley.
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I voted for the turnover option. As we get further away from that game, we dominated the game everywhere but turnovers and the scoreboard (duh!). It took everything that could go wrong to go wrong for us to lose that game. Give USCe credit … they took advantage of the opportunities we gave them.
I still say we need to find ways to open up the offense to take advantage of what Jake does best … pre-snap reads to hit quick passes (a guy in New England has taken that approach to become the best QB of all time), and we need more edge runs to force defenses to defend the width of the field.
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The second best quarterback in all time. The best ever was Unitas at Baltimore. If he had been able to play in 1969, Joe would never have won. Of course, you may be too young to remember it. Or you were not even born.
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I was 1 year old 🙂
My father talks about Unitas as a truly great QB, but as a team, they couldn’t get over the Bart Starr/Packers hump.
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Unitas wouldn’t have been anything without Jimmy Orr (Class of ’57) to throw to. 😉
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I’d lean more towards turnovers telling the tale if we didn’t have the game file of the passing game’s inability to generate explosive plays in both the Notre Dame and most of the Tennessee game on top of the crap-fest that was South Carolina and Kentucky. The offense scheme just flat out sucks right now and is predictable as hell.
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It’s more than a little concerning to me that this loss is being retconned as a “one off”. Tells me no lessons were really learned…
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I’m hoping that it’s mostly coach-speak and players showing solidarity with each other and the coaches. The best you’ll ever get from a head coach is something like “we need to do a better job of putting our guys in position to be successful”, not “yeah I don’t know what the hell Coley was thinking on that play.” And if we heard any real criticism from the players, we’d all be fretting about how Kirby and Coley had lost the locker room.
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This is true. We all remember how terrible the offense looked under Chaney in 2016, and while there was some talk about “more RPOs” there were some good scheme changes that helped (plus, a vastly improved Oline) by 2017.
That said, I’d still rather start 2020 with Bobo at OC than another year of OJT for Coley.
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I don’t even think it’s OJT for Coley at this point in his career. I thought he was OC at FSU under Fischer (with Fischer calling plays) before he went to be OC at Miami. Not saying that coaches can’t develop just like players do (Bobo certainly did), but I’m more inclined to believe that this is just who Coley is.
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Our rushing yards and yards per attempt have been on a steady decline starting with the Notre Dame game. We couldn’t cross the 50yard line against the 42nd ranked defense in the nation (Kentucky). It’s not an anomolay, something is wrong with the offense.
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Mostly column A with a little of column B. Coley needs to do better as a game-planner and play-caller, but the Dawgs would’ve won without the turnovers. And don’t forget the two missed FGs (1 blocked), plus a penalty at the end of the game which prevented us from trying a long FG.
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Evergreen quote from a Georgia player:
“…sometimes we weren’t focused enough, or sometimes we were complacent about who we were or what we were doing.”
Pick a year…and year except 1980…and that quote can define at least one game during the season.
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That quote comes from any team that loses a game they shouldn’t. Definitely not unique to Georgia.
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I feel like I don’t really know. The weather at the Kentucky game dictating conservative play calling clouds my judgement. I’ll feel better answering that question after the Florida game.
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I voted for flaws being exposed because of everything mentioned above plus ine other thing. I have a friend who is a die hard Seminole. We were talking last Friday and I was venting my frustrations and he said, ‘Oh yeah Coley sucks. He was our offensive coordinator and Jimbo wouldn’t let him call the plays. He’s terrible, y’all have got to get rid of him.’
You know that part on Braveheart where William seed that Robert Bruce betrayed him, and he lays down in the grass to die? That’s pretty much what I felt like after our conversation.
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Miami fans flooded message boards to warn us that Coley was terrible too. For whatever reason; Smart decided Coley was the best option. The Coley promotion is the first thing Smart has done that has me questioning whether or not he can get the job done. Coley was/is a known entity and his reputation as an OC is not a good one yet Smart still promoted him to OC.
If Smart retains Coley as OC after this season, I’ll know we have Richt 2.0 on our hands.
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Obviously play calling matters as evidenced by our general anemia on offense but sabans gone through four play caller / offensive coordinators the last 4 years and if anything his offense is more explosive than ever. I have a hard time believing that their players are light years better than ours. Given our army of analysts and what I mentioned above there has got to be a solution to this.
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Wasn’t it TX A&M that was trying to hire him last year??
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I don’t follow it so closely that I would know who was or wasn’t seeking to hire an underling coach of ours. I’m just going off what my buddy told me. Plus, everyone raves his recruiting prowess. So if it’s true, that could have something to do with that also. 😉
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I’d say it’s C. All of the above. We were absolutely exposed by Scarolina but would still have won the game if we hadn’t turned it over 4 times. That pick 6 killed us. We’ve definitely got some issues on offense but turning it over 4 times was the anomaly.
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If that were an option, I’d vote for it too. If there’s only say 2 TOs, the Dawgs are undefeated, but the issues on offense — which have really showed up in every game save Murray St and Arkansas St, but in the passing game have been extra present from ND on — are still there.
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One thing to remember about the USCjr game is that only one turnover (Jake’s pick six) came before the fourth quarter. Kirby likes to use turnovers as the excuse for that game, and without them UGA probably pulls out a slim win, but it still doesn’t excuse how absolutely miserable the offense was.
Personally, I’m in full Munson mode about the offense. I haven’t seen any indication from Kirby or Coley that things are going to change, so I fully expect more of the same. If UGA wins this game it will be with defense and special teams.
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This. I respect everyone’s grasp at optimism but, folks, this ain’t gonna suddenly be fixed for this game or this season. Kirby will double down on what isn’t working and will stick with it for at least another year before facing reality. We just have to play better?? That’s the solution to what we’ve all seen as poor offensive planning and scheming? Brilliant!!
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Kirby learned from the best, but we don’t and likely never will have Bama’s hyper focused football culture. So he has to scheme around “rat poison”. Play a game you can afford to lose pure vanilla. Let the team struggle, even lose. Then he has their total attention living on the edge for the rest of the season. Auburn I, LSU, now USCe. It’s a pattern. Trust Kirby.
The alternative is we suck despite our talent and investment in resources. I ask all of you, which is more likely?
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I will take the easy way out and say both even though I voted for the flaws being exposed. Even before the game against the Gamecocks I felt the play calling was frustrating and making things more difficult on Fromm in the passing game. However, Georgia did win the statistical battle against SC except for those pesky turnover and scoreboard columns.
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I think both are kind of true, but I do believe if we played 10 times, we win 9 of them. We just happened to play the wrong one. So I picked the first one as my answer. However, I think the flaws in our offense exacerbated the anamoly, if that makes sense.
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Probably more like 7 out of 10. Problem is we look like we lose at least that many against LSU and Bama. Maybe even UF and Auburn. Guess we’ll find out soon.
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We were saying this before UF last year after the LSU disaster, but how this team looks this weekend will tell us a lot about Kirby as a coach and what his celing is. If we are anemic on offense and get pounded by this bunch of Gators, then the stigma of great recruiter, ok coach will be solidified in the minds of many (rightly or wrongly). If this team goes 9-3 or heaven forbid 8-4, we will lose a lot of momentum as a program.
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Dear all you bitches and turds,
Nice call on the “flawed offense” take. Y’all know as much about the football 🏈 as you do about the fornicating. Maybe just shut up and enjoy the game the way Kirby tells you to.
Sincerely,
Three in a row versus 🆚 Florida
p.s. you bitches and turds and your piss-soaked hind-leg “Inner” goddamn “Munsons” know who you goddamn are
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