Kirby Smart breaks down Georgia's tough schedule in 2024
As Georgia looks to regain its perch atop the college football world after narrowly missing the playoffs ins 2024, one thing it will have to manage is an incredibly tough schedule.
The Bulldogs will face the Clemson Tigers in the non-conference slate, along with the traditional Georgia Tech matchup. Then a gauntlet of an SEC slate looms, as well.
Despite that tough schedule, Georgia will go into the season with lofty expectations.
“We’ll be the favorite in some people’s eyes,” coach Kirby Smart said Monday on the Paul Finebaum Show. “Some people will find things wrong with us. We’ve got a really hard schedule. We play three top-15 teams on the road in our conference, that’s tough.”
Those three road games come against Alabama, Texas and Ole Miss. While the Bulldogs will have a bye week before the Alabama game, it will come after another road trip to Kentucky.
The other two games won’t afford any bye week to prepare, with the Ole Miss contest coming directly after an always hotly contested Florida-Georgia affair in Jacksonville, Fla.
Navigate most of those challenges on a very tough schedule and Georgia will presumably be a playoff team. Smart sounds like a man who’s expecting just that.
“We’ve got a good football team. We’ve got a very consistent football team,” he said. “We say it all the time, ‘We’re built to sustain at Georgia. We don’t want to be a one-hit wonder. We don’t want to live and die through the portal. We want to grow our players from signing with us, make them better and then give them an opportunity at the next level and to be better contributors to society.'”
Because of that building process, Georgia has become one of the nation’s most consistent contenders under Smart’s watch. None of that should change in 2024, tough schedule or not.
Especially not with starting quarterback Carson Beck returning and the Bulldogs doing a nice job supplementing his surrounding skill position cast with a healthy influx from the transfer portal.
“I think we’re going to have a good football team next year,” Smart said. “I don’t know how good, and I don’t know how we’ll play on some really tough road games, but we’ll see where it falls.”