Morning, y’all!
I can’t believe we are halfway through the regular season. Time flies when it’s your favorite season of the year.
After six games, Georgia has emerged as the No. 1 team in the country and has shown its talent and dominance at multiple position groups.
Ahead of Georgia’s game against Auburn this Saturday, though, one unfortunate topic we have to get into is the Bulldogs’ injury situation, as injuries continue to pile up. Granted, it didn’t slow Georgia down much against Alabama, but you’d still like to get some guys back healthy.
Here’s what Georgia coach Kirby Smart had to say about injuries, particularly at running back, on Monday:
Smart brought a very happy, but very beat up, football team back to Athens on Sunday morning after a 20-17 win at Alabama.
The No. 1-ranked Bulldogs (6-0, 4-0 SEC) won’t have much time for rest and recovery, however, as they play host to Auburn (3-2, 1-2) at 3:30 p.m. Saturday (TV: ESPN).
The Tigers were idle Saturday, giving them more time for preparation and recovery.
Georgia is particularly thin at the tailback position, down three scholarship players since the end of spring drills.
“We don’t have anybody to add there, Tyriq Green? He can’t move there,” Smart said, asked how he would address the lack of depth. “We have the guys we’ve got.”
Smart chose not to address the request to update the injury status of other tailbacks, as he has pointed to the SEC requiring teams to submit an official injury report on Wednesday nights.
Touchdown-leading tailback Chauncey Bowens was a surprise add to the injury report last week in the wake of the Vanderbilt game.
Bowens appeared to suffer an ankle injury at the end of the first half before returning to action in the second half.
Nate Frazier, who was the starting tailback in the season-opening game, was a late scratch before the Alabama game, deemed unable to play during the Georgia pregame warmups.
Frazier, who suffered a rib injury in the Bulldogs win over Arkansas on Sept. 19, has 211 rushing yards on 26 carries and five touchdowns in three games.
“It’s a bad situation because we thought all week he was gonna play, and he didn’t feel like he could go,” Smart said after the Alabama game. “He was in pain. It continues to be painful for him, and not a lot we can do. I mean, like I said, we’re a beat-up football team and we’re down three backs, really.”
Georgia lost tailback Dante Dowdell before the season started, as the transfer from Kentucky suffered multiple injuries in an ATV accident during the preseason.
Georgia receiver Isiah Canion, a transfer from Georgia Tech who has been out with a right leg injury since the first quarter of the Arkansas game, was listed most of last week as “questionable” to see action against the Tide before being downgraded to “out” on Friday.
Receiver Thomas Blackshear has been listed as “out” for the game after he suffered a shoulder injury against Vanderbilt. Blackshear, seen on the sideline in a sling, made three catches for 33 yards in the Oct. 3 game.
“It (Canion injury) is a lower extremity injury, we had to go all (last) week not knowing on Isiah, we knew on Thomas,” Smart said. “If you talk to Mike (Bobo) and the offensive staff its frustrating, because you don’t know who’s in and who’s out.”
Read Mike Griffith’s full story here.
Georgia linemen win SEC awards after beating Tide in trenches
Smart likes to say “it all starts up front,” and that was a big chunk of the reason why Georgia beat Alabama.
The SEC office took notice, naming UGA offensive guard Dontrell Glover the SEC Offensive Lineman of the Week and Joseph Jonah-Ajonye the SEC Defensive Lineman of the Week.
The Bulldogs rushed for 206 yards and primary backs Dwight Phillips Jr. (17 carries, 120 yards) and Bo Walker (10 carries, 69 yards) averaged 7 yards per carry between them against an Alabama defense that ranked 10th in the nation entering the game.
Trivia time
What is Smart’s record against Auburn in the 11 times his Bulldogs have played the Tigers?
Also, I know we’re mostly starting to move on to Auburn, but I couldn’t resist including this story from Jeff Sentell from the Bama game. You’ll see why:
The ‘They said I wasn’t big enough’ story from UGA’s big win at Bama
When Zykie Helton lined up to take the field right before his Georgia football team faced Alabama on Saturday night, he was at the center of it all.
A game official stood at the mouth of the tunnel leading to the visiting team’s locker room.
Smart was right behind him. No shoulder blades separated Helton from his head coach. For this occasion, he was Smart’s right-hand man.
That cannot be seen as a mere coincidence.
Not even for the fact that the true freshman vaulted some veteran former high school All-Americans to starter-level in his first few months in Athens.
Last fall, when Helton was a high school senior at Carrollton High, he broke down his remarkable comeback from a highly touted prospect who weighed about 320 to 335 pounds and then almost lost it all.
The former 3-star lost so much weight while fighting Crohn’s disease that he dropped to 220 pounds. Helton was no longer an elite interior offensive lineman prospect for the 2026 class. He looked more like a middle backer.
Helton had been the first prospect to commit to Alabama’s 2026 class while Nick Saban was still head coach. When the program transitioned to Kalen DeBoer, he said he went about eight weeks without hearing from Alabama.
Did Helton fall through the cracks? Or was it his weight? That’s what the other recruiters from other programs had been telling him.
Helton described that time last August during his senior year.
Helton said it was the lowest point of his ordeal after losing basically a middle schooler’s worth of weight.
“The low was I’m hitting college coaches up,” he said. “Trying to get recruited and I’m getting texts like ‘Hey, you’re not big enough’ and I’m getting ‘Hey, you need to gain weight and we’ll talk to you’ and that was one of my lowest points in my lifetime.
“Not getting recruited for like eight months. This was when I was committed to Bama and I wasn’t really talking to them. They had a new coaching staff and I didn’t hear from the new coaching staff for like eight weeks until they got into a new program. No, it was a couple of months and so I decommitted.”
Read Jeff’s full story here.
Trivia answer
10-1
