ATHENS – Kirby Smart knows the brief history of how teams with byes have performed in the College Football Playoff.

In the first season of a 12-team playoff, all four top seeds lost their first game following the layoff between conference championship weekend and the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoff.

Georgia fell 23-10 to Notre Dame in last year’s Sugar Bowl. But it’s important to note that without quarterback Carson Beck, Georgia was actually a point-spread underdog against Notre Dame.

“I don’t know that I can provide the layoff with any excuse,” Smart said. “I think that’s what the general public and the people on the outside world want to say that the layoff had to do with it. I think it had something to do with a good football team we played against.”

Georgia is the lone team from last year’s field to earn a bye in the College Football Playoff once again.

It doesn’t yet know whether it will play Ole Miss or Tulane. Those two teams meet in Oxford, Mississippi on Dec. 20.

That presents some challenges for Georgia as it tries to set itself up for better success in this year’s College Football Playoff.

“We took an approach last year that we were going to prepare for both teams in our advanced scout. We’ll do the same thing,” Smart said. “We’ll treat those teams as equals. We’ll have coaches assigned to them. Coordinators will look at both, but we’ll split our staff in half, look hard at both teams, dive into their seasons.”

While the Bulldogs are preparing for both foes — Ole Miss is a heavy favorite — Georgia will spend much of next week working on itself. This week was largely limited to meetings, resting and recovering for players while they also dealt with finals.

With campus to themselves next week, Georgia will additionally spend a good part of practice focusing on itself. That includes self-scouting, giving practice reps to younger backups and searching for any key advantages that can be gained.

“We’ll do a lot of research into ourselves and study other teams in the country that were maybe top in their areas,” Smart said. “Red-area, third down, two minute, everything, and just try to, you know, steal the inches and try to get better ourselves. So that’s the way we’ll approach that.”

A key difference between the 2024 season and this year — beyond the health and experince level of Georgia’s starting quarterback Gunner Stockton — is how the College Football Playoffs are seeded. Last season saw Notre Dame end up as the No. 7 seed despite being ranked as the No. 5 overall team in the final rankings. The Fighting Irish were jumped by conference champions Boise State and Arizona State for the No. 3 and No. 4 seeds.

This season sees the top four teams in the final rankings actually earn the top four seeds, and thus byes, in the College Football Playoff.

That should only further help Georgia. Not that Smart is looking for advantages or making any excuses when it comes to Georgia’s first College Football Playoff game this season.

“We were young in some areas, inexperienced in some areas, broke down on special teams, lost the middle eight,” Smart said. “Those didn’t happen because of the layoff. We didn’t give up a touchdown and then another touchdown and then a kickoff return for a touchdown right after the second half, start of the second half because of the layoff. I have a lot of confidence in the history of what we do in these windows, but at the end of the day, we got to execute in the game.”