Winner: Georgia’s win over Ole Miss
This upcoming week will be our last without real College Football Playoff rankings to discuss. The first batch of rankings drop on Nov. 4, the Tuesday following the Florida game.
Should Georgia take care of the rival Gators this weekend, the Bulldogs should very well be one of the top teams in the first set of rankings.
Georgia is 6-1 on the season to this point, with its most recent win doubling as its most impressive. With Ole Miss, who Georgia beat 43-35 on Oct. 18, beating Oklahoma on Saturday, Georgia will possess one of the better wins of any team in the country.
Ole Miss is 7-1 on the season, with the lone loss coming against Georgia. After falling flat in the fourth quarter against the Bulldogs, the Rebels dusted themselves off and picked up a road win over a ranked Oklahoma team.
The rest of the slate for Ole Miss is fairly forgiving, with South Carolina, Florida and Mississippi State being the remaining conference foes.
Add in Georgia’s win over Tennessee, who still has playoff hopes of its own, and the Bulldogs shouldn’t have to fret about how their schedule stacks up with others.
Even with a loss to Alabama, Georgia will have enough quality wins to carry the resume.
The victory over Ole Miss, strong at the time, should only continue to age well as we get deeper into the season.
Loser: LSU
While things didn’t exactly hit James Franklin speed, things deteriorated fast at LSU.
The Tigers made the decision to fire Brian Kelly on Sunday. LSU now sits at 5-3 on the season and enters an off week coming off a humiliating home defeat to Texas A&M, where the Aggies scored the first 35 points of the second half.
Kelly is an easy target in part because of his demeanor. He thought he could simply do what he did at Notre Dame and bring it to LSU and win championships.
That did not happen, despite the three head coaches at LSU before Kelly all winning national championships.
Kelly produced plenty of elite players in his time at LSU but things never felt right. His personality never meshed with what LSU needed from its head coach.
But a certain level of blame should be assigned to athletic director Scott Woodward, who will now hire Kelly’s replacement.
We know Woodward likes to swing big, as evidenced by his hiring of Kelly. Woodward also hired Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M. Kelly, whose buyout is $54 million, and Fisher have the two highest buyouts of any fired coach.
Someone else will now get rich at LSU, taking over a program that is in theory, close to winning a national championship. The Tigers have all the resources a coach could want.
Kelly saw that, which is why he probably took the LSU job against his better judgment.
Given Florida and Penn State are also open, there will be plenty of attractive candidates. But as the Kelly hiring and firing shows, winning is far from guaranteed at a school. Especially to the degree to which the Baton Rouge faithful have come to expect.
Winner: Georgia’s potential November resume
We touched earlier on how valuable Georgia’s win over Ole Miss will be when it comes time to discuss Georgia’s inclusion in the College Football Playoff field.
While some teams like Indiana and Ole Miss have already navigated the most difficult parts of their schedules, Georgia still has a few more marquee opportunities ahead.
Georgia has to take care of business against Florida and Mississippi State. Neither game will be played in Sanford Stadium and both foes have proven capable of hanging with superior competition.
From there, Georgia’s next home game comes against No. 20 Texas. The Longhorns certainly haven’t looked like an elite team but they’ve found ways to win in each of the last two weeks. Texas has a home game against No. 9 Vanderbilt this week before getting a bye before it travels to Georgia.
Perhaps surprisingly, Texas is no the highest-ranked team left on Georgia’s schedule. That would be the No. 8 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.
Brent Key’s squad is the lone unbeaten team in the ACC, as the Yellow Jackets crushed Syracuse this weekend.
While Georgia Tech may not have an impressive win, it keeps finding ways to win. And we know how much that game against Georgia means to that program and Key.
With College Football Playoff talk ramping up, there will surely be pundits who try to knock Georgia. But if the Bulldogs keep winning, it’ll have a pretty ironclad resume, filled with marquee victories.
Loser: Steve Sarkisian
Texas found a way to win on the road in the SEC, rallying from 17 points in the fourth quarter to beat Mississippi State in overtime.
But yesterday was not a very fun day for the Texas head coach. The day began with a report from Dianna Russini of The Athletic, where she indicated Sarkisian might be interested in the opening the Tennessee Titans have.
Then his team fell behind against a Mississippi State team that hasn’t won an SEC game since 2023. For the second consecutive week, Texas needed overtime to pull out a win against one of the worst teams in the conference.
In overtime, starting quarterback Arch Manning exited the game with an injury. His health status will be worth following in the days to come.
All of this drama comes before a stretch where the Longhorns have games against the No. 3, No. 5 and No. 9 teams in the country.
Texas began the season as the No. 1 team in the country. It has hardly ever looked like it, slogging its way to a 6-2 record.
Sarkisian has earned plenty of praise for how he’s turned around the Texas program. The Longhorns have made it to the semifinals in each of the last two College Football Playoffs.
But this season has been wildly unfun for the program and figures to get only more difficult in November.
Winner: Georgia’s offensive line
No group needed the opportunity to rest and recover more than this group. Through seven games, the Bulldogs have rolled out six different starting combinations.
The group came together against Ole Miss and delivered perhaps its best performance of the season. Georgia started Monroe Freeling and Earnest Greene at offensive tackle together for just the third time this season.
Freeling has been dealing with an ankle injury, while Greene has a bad back. Add in an ankle injury for Juan Gaston and the Bulldogs have been stretched thin with this group.
All were able to make it through the Ole Miss game and thus use the off week to get even healthier.
Georgia will face some stout defensive lines to close out the season, with Florida and Texas in particular standing out. The offensive line is going to need to play its best football during the final month of the season if the offense is to continue to play as one of the most efficient in the country.
“At first it was a little hectic just because we haven’t played next to each other, but now I think we’ve gotten so good at everybody playing everywhere and playing with different people and kind of trusting each other that it doesn’t really matter who’s gonna be in the game,” Freeling said. “We’re all gonna be on the same page. We’re all gonna wanna compete together and communicate and work as a unit.”
The hope is that the Bulldogs have turned the corner when it comes to their health issues and can gel in a way last year’s team did not.
