ATHENS — In discussing Georgia’s season-opening win, Kirby Smart noted it came against an inferior opponent in Tennessee State.

When Georgia beat Western Kentucky the following week, Smart noted that the Hilltoppers were overmatched. The 70-20 score reflects that.

The Bulldogs won their first two games of the 2026 season with ease. Gunner Stockton is yet to play a snap in the second half, as he’s led Georgia to touchdowns on all 11 of his drives thus far.

Smart knows things won’t always be this easy for the Bulldogs. He expects things to look very different for Georgia this weekend.

Georgia goes on the road in the SEC for the first time this season. Smart has been at Georgia long enough to know these environments are never easy.

Even against an Arkansas team that may well again be the worst team in the conference.

“Playing on the road in the SEC, humility is always a week away,” Smart said. “It’s a tough environment regardless of where you play in the SEC. There are no bad environments in the SEC. There are only raucous environments in the SEC. They’re really tough to play in.”

For as great as Georgia has looked, Smart knows at some point his team is going to be challenged in a real way.

When the Bulldogs have gone on the road in recent seasons, that first game away from Sanford Stadium has always been a little tricky. Each of Georgia’s previous three road-openers have been one-score wins. The Bulldogs needed an all-time effort from Brock Bowers in 2023 to beat Auburn. Last season, Georgia needed a brilliant pass from Gunner Stockton, a missed Tennessee field goal and overtime to escape with their first road win of the season.

Yet despite possessing a talent advantage in each of those games, the Bulldogs had to fight their way to a win. That could well be the case again on Saturday.

“Depends on who you play and how you play,” Smart said. “You learn a lot about them if they have adversity, and I’ve learned a lot about our teams in the past from going and playing in SEC environments when maybe we haven’t played our best, or maybe you get in one of those hornets nest games, and you’ve gotta fight your way out of it.”

A week after Georgia faces Arkansas, the Bulldogs welcome Oklahoma to Sanford Stadium. The game is set for a 3:30 p.m. ET start and pits two College Football Playoff teams from last season against each other.

It will be the first time this season the Bulldogs face a foe that has the talent on paper to stress, and possibly beat, Georgia. But games aren’t played on paper, as the 2024 game against Kentucky showed.

The Bulldogs squeezed out a 13-12 victory over Kentucky. Those Wildcats went 1-7 in SEC games, while the Bulldogs won the conference. Yet Georgia found itself in a four-quarter fight against its SEC foe.

That same season saw Georgia open against Clemson. The Bulldogs dominated the Tigers in Atlanta, winning 34-3. That game, against a Power 4 foe, gave Georgia some confidence heading into SEC play that it can hang with capable opponents.

The Bulldogs won nonconference games against Power 4 teams in 2021 and 2022. During those seasons, Georgia had a much easier time in its first road contest.

After beating Clemson to open the 2021 season, Georgia won 62-0 in a road win over Vanderbilt. The next year saw Georgia beat Oregon in Atlanta before exiting Columbia, South Carolina, with a 48-7 win over the Gamecocks.

Smart has long been a fan of big nonconference games, like the Texas-Ohio State and Oklahoma-Michigan games were this past weekend.

But those games have been dropped from the schedule in part because the SEC added a ninth conference game. The Bulldogs mutually agreed to cancel recent games against UCLA, NC State and Louisville. While no one would confuse those teams with Ohio State, they would’ve certainly presented a better test than Western Kentucky or Tennessee State.

And perhaps Smart would have a better idea of how his team would look entering SEC play.

“The opponents haven’t been SEC opponents, so it’s all rosy and dandy until you go on the road and you gotta play somebody of SEC caliber and it’s hard,” Smart said. “And also we have some adversity. This team has not really had adversity, so we’re gonna find out.”

Georgia players are looking forward to taking their talents on the road for the first time this season.

They can tell there is an extra intensity with Smart and the Georgia coaching staff this week.

Even if the Bulldogs will face tougher SEC foes, they understand it will be a challenge going on the road in conference play this week.

That the Bulldogs haven’t really been stressed to this point, because of their schedule, makes Saturday’s game more of a mystery than Georgia would feel comfortable with.

“We gotta be on our A game because it’s not just a regular game — it’s an SEC game, and every SEC game is tough,” cornerback Demello Jones said. “We just gotta know that we gotta be on our A game every day. We can’t take nothing for granted. Practice hard every day, do what the coach say, and we can’t, like, just slack.”