Georgia defense comes up a few plays short

Georgia head coach Kirby Smart has seen many things in his coaching career. But even he had to do a double-take at the defensive stat sheet after Georgia’s 24-21 loss to Alabama on Saturday night.

“I’ve coached a lot of years and we’ve never been 13 of 19 on third down, and that tells the tale of the game,” Smart said. “We controlled the line of scrimmage and held the run down for them, which was the goal, and then we got on third down, and we did not play well on third down, and it showed pretty much all night.” 

Despite improving as the game went on, the Bulldogs did not do enough to keep Smart from dropping to 1-7 against the Crimson Tide via a 24-21 home loss.

Georgia once again started slowly on the defensive side, allowing back-to-back touchdown drives to open the game. Alabama converted all eight of its third-down attempts on those two possessions.

“It’s definitely frustrating not getting off the field,” linebacker CJ Allen said. “You can’t win like that.”

Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson came into the game on a hot streak. That continued in the first half with a 15-of-23 performance for 192 yards and a pair of touchdowns.

Georgia also failed to get much pressure on Simpson, although Smart believes that isn’t as it appears to the casual observer.

“We got free runners on the quarterback, he gets the ball out. We get a free runner on the quarterback, he breaks a tackle, spins out, goes and runs around and throws a completion,” Smart said. “You play zone, he hits you in a soft spot, a cover two hole throw, I mean, early in the game. He made some really, really good plays, and we were pitching and throwing to him, but at the end of the day, to play well in this league on third down, you’ve got to be able to put hands on people and cover them. We did that in the second half. We didn’t really do that in the first, and it wasn’t that we didn’t try. They just beat us.”

Smart added that teams get the ball out faster than ever in modern college football. Sometimes, he said, the answer is not to blitz more players, but drop more in coverage.

But Smart is also aware that his team needs to figure out how to disrupt opposing offenses.

“We’ve got to affect the quarterback,” Smart said. “We’ve got to do a better job of affecting the quarterback. I mean, we’ve got more packages than the man in the moon to affect the quarterback, but we’ve got to do it. We’ve got do it, and we’ve got to go out there and execute and be able to do it.”

The defense did come to play in the second half. The Bulldogs shut out Alabama and limited the Crimson Tide to 135 yards.

Part of that, according to corner Daylen Everette, stemmed from a coverage adjustment.

“We played a little soft coverage in the first half,” Everette said. “We tried to come down and challenge them more. I feel like it started to work, and definitely D-line has done a good job trying to stop the run. Those adjustments we made at halftime, it definitely helped.”

Georgia did stop the run effectively, limiting Alabama to 117 yards on its 38 carries. The Bulldogs now need to have the pass rush and secondary complement each other to shore up the pass defense as SEC play rolls on.

“We’ve got to do a better job as coaches to help those players start better,” Smart said. “It’s because we were spotting people too much and not executing at a high level. Sometimes it’s execution. Sometimes it’s, hey, they got a good call, they got a good play call, and they go out and execute against us. But if I didn’t think we could cover them or didn’t think we could stop them, it’d be disappointing. But to do it in the second half is certainly frustrating for us.”