ATHENS — A year ago, Kirby Smart stood at the podium after a loss to Alabama and pointed out how Georgia had not gotten the chance to play Alabama at home.
The opportunity arrived on Saturday. Yet the song sounded exactly the same, as the Bulldogs fell behind early and just couldn’t quite come back in the second.
Instead of losing 41-34, Georgia lost 24-21.
Prior to Smart pointing out that Georgia hadn’t played Alabama at home he was asked why his program, one of the best in the country, was 1-6 against the Crimson Tide.
Saturday night, he was asked the same question, only with a now 1-7 record.
“I mean, what’s everybody else’s record against them? You’ve got it,” Smart asked. “I don’t [have it] either. I don’t lose sleep over that because those games have been, like, championship-caliber games, right? And even when we play in the regular season, they’ve been — I just saw 25 scouts out there. They’re all there to watch these teams play.
“That’s not gonna affect me. I’m gonna be happy, and just go-lucky if our team comes back and plays well. That’s what I worry about. But that, it’s just, we’ve got to get better. Next year won’t have anything to do with this year. Thank you guys.”
The problem with Smart’s defiance in this moment is that Georgia doesn’t measure itself against everyone else’s standards. Georgia likes to say it’s not for everyone.
Smart is 108-20 as a coach. Seven of those losses — 35% — are against one school.
It is now no longer a Nick Saban problem but an Alabama one. Smart is 0-2 against Kalen DeBoer. The Alabama coach came in with a 2-4 road record. He lost games at Oklahoma, Tennessee and Vanderbilt last season.
He’s now got a road win over Georgia, snapping a 33-game home winning streak that stretched back to 2019. DeBoer was the offensive coordinator at Indiana that season.
Losing to Alabama has become commonplace for Georgia. But it doesn’t have to totally end Georgia’s season like it did in 2017 or 2023. Georgia rebounded in 2021 to win the national championship, the lone win against the Crimson Tide.
After Georgia’s loss to Alabama last season, the Bulldogs still found a way into the College Football Playoff and won the SEC. To do so again, the Bulldogs will likely have to go 9-1 the rest of the way if they don’t want to leave things in the hands of the College Football Playoff committee.
The road ahead still looks daunting, with games against ranked foes Ole Miss, Texas and Georgia Tech. There are road trips against Auburn and Mississippi State on the schedule, the latter of which took Tennessee to overtime.
Georgia ran a similar gamut last season. There’s confidence from the players it can be repeated.
“We just know that the season’s not over,” wide receiver Colbie Young said. “There’s a lot of great teams in the SEC. We just lost (to) one, and we’ve just got to come back next week. We can’t let it pile on. We’ve got to move on to the next week.”
Smart didn’t share quite the same confidence, pointing to how this is a younger and more unproven team.
“We’re playing some young diamonds, some young skill guys on defense, and it’s got to continue to grow and get better,” Smart said. “I mean, the key is with the locker room, do you take the team in the right direction, the leadership, and say, OK, we know what we’ve got to work on, let’s get better at it.”
That starts next week at home against Kentucky. It will be a chance to build back better after the latest tough, hard-fought loss to Alabama.
Georgia ran the ball for 227 yards on Saturday, the most ever against Alabama since Smart became the head coach. It shut out the Crimson Tide in the second half.
But it also gave up 13 third-down conversions, the most ever under Smart. There was a dropped touchdown pass by a player wearing No. 11 and a costly fumble on Georgia’s side of the field that led to an Alabama field goal.
Both sequences happened last year to Georgia in its loss to Alabama. History repeated itself for the Bulldogs on Saturday.
Time will tell if Georgia is able to get better and replicate the same feat it did in 2024.
Or if this loss becomes what defines this Georgia team. A group of fighters, but one not quite good enough to make the winning plays against everyone else.
“I realize it’s a big game, I realize everybody wants to make a big deal about it, but for us, it happened to us last year, right,” Smart said. “We’ve got to go worry about the next one, because you can’t let this game beat you twice.”
