ATHENS — David Pollack has never been one to hold back, as a College Football Hall of Fame football player at Georgia, or sports analyst.

The former Bulldogs’ All-American calls it like he sees it, and much to the chagrin of UGA fans, he’s not seeing Georgia as a preseason Top 5 team in 2025.

“Yeah, absolutely, I’m not putting Georgia in the top five,” Pollack said on his show, ‘See Ball Get Ball. “They lost a good bit.”

The Bulldogs had 13 players selected in the 2025 NFL Draft, including three first-rounders, and are replacing projected first-round NFL talent Carson Beck after the gifted passer detoured from declaring for the draft to transfer to Miami, Fla.

“Georgia, they lost a good bit ... that’s a lot of guys drafted from a team that, you know, Kirby said he did best coaching yet (with), just to keep them in order.

I’m interested to watch them. The offensive line got a lot of guys drafted high .... they couldn’t run the football.”

Pollack makes a fair point, especially after projected 2025 starting quarterback Gunner Stockton and his rising competition, Ryan Puglisi, were inconsistent in the annual G-Day Game.

Both did some good things and both did some poor things, which, when you get in a game environment, they need that,” Smart said after the spring game.

“They need a game environment, they need a pocket, they need live, they need to play football. And, they continue to get better. They understand they have some weapons on the outside.”

Program insiders told DawgNation that Stockton and Puglisi weren’t any more impressive in the closed scrimmage the week before, to the extent that there’s some question to whether or not walk-on Colter Ginn might get some consideration in the QB competition.

Pollack said he expects Stockton to be Georgia’s starting quarterback, but he wonders about the team’s starpower.

"Who are you depending on right now that’s you’re saying is an All-American at Georgia? I could have named five a year ago," Pollack said.

“This is the first time for me going into a season, where I’m like, ‘Who are Georgia’s dudes? Like, Who are the guys, defensively, offensively ...?”

It’s why Pollack said there’s a departure from the norm when it comes to the Bulldogs’ preseason hype, in his eyes.

“Every year we’ve gone into is going, ‘Georgia’s the best team,” Pollack said. “Georgia and Ohio State versus everyone else.

“This year, I’ve got four, five, six, seven teams and I’m like, ‘OK, they might be fighting for that next tier of the next five.”

Pollack’s post-spring, post-portal Top 5:

• Texas

• 1. Texas

• 2. Ohio State

• 3. Oregon

• 4. Clemson

• 5. Penn State

Pollack isn’t alone projecting that Georgia’s recent dynasty — the Bulldogs are the defending SEC champions and the league’s most recent national champs, winning back-to-back titles in 2021 and 2022— is on shakier ground than accustomed to.

SEC Network star Peter Burns recently explained to DawgNation why he said the SEC might run through Texas — not Georgia — even though the Bulldogs beat the Longhorns twice last season.

“It’s more of a 1A and 1B, and I give Texas the edge because of Arch (Manning), their schedule and the NIL money,” Burns, who picked Georgia to win the SEC the past four seasons, told DawgNation. “But I’m not saying there’s going to be a major drop-off or 8-4 season or anything like that.”

The SEC teams play the same in-conference competition this season as last, except with the home-away locations flip-flopped.

Texas played only two league teams with winning SEC records last season — Georgia and Texas A&M.

The Bulldogs, meanwhile, played Top 10 teams in Alabama, Ole Miss, Texas and Tennessee.

Chris Doering, a former Florida receiver and current analyst on the SEC Network, pointed to how the transfer portal has affected Coach Kirby Smart’s ability to build and maintain championship depth.

“We’ve always felt good about their depth and next man up, but the questions about the quarterback position are legitimate, and you look at the way they were physically beaten up by Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl — we don’t see that when teams play Kirby’s Bulldogs — so there are legitimate questions about how far the gap is,” Doering said.

“I don’t think anyone has necessarily passed them, but they aren’t head and shoulders above everyone else like they had been for the last five or six years.”