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Georgia opens official college football offseason third among title favorites
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Georgia opens official college football offseason third among title favorites
ATHENS — Kirby Smart and his Georgia football team have already started working on the 2025 campaign, but now they can do so with last season in the rearview mirror.
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Too many questions right now in my mind about the 2025 coaching, talent, and team dynamics for me to seriously think we've got a shot at the Natty. I'll have to wait and see how we look in September. The schedule is another gauntlet.
While I do think there are some needed changes to the CFP, one thing for sure is...the best team in the country won the National championship. They got that right. No one can dispute a team that dominated Tennessee, Oregon, Texas, and now Notre Dame. The Buckeyes had the most difficult path to the Championship and they blew the doors off it. If building - and keeping - a roster to be able to do that requires more money then the Dawgs better start sweetening the pot if they want to get their hands on that trophy again. That's the reality of it.
@MontanaDawg
This is the storyline that Dawgnation is going with but don't overrate NIL here. Of Ohio State's 22 starters, only 4 came from the portal: QB Will Howard, RB Quinshon Judkins, FS Caleb Downs and CB Davison Igbinosun. And even that needs context: Howard was needed only because Ohio State lost QBs Quinn Ewers (Texas) and Kyle McCord (who set the ACC single season passing record at Syracuse) to the portal. And Judkins was only 1 of 2 Texas 1000 yard rushers this season. (The other, TreVeyon Henderson, was injured when Ohio State played Georgia for the 2022 national title.) Make no mistake: the Ohio State title team was built primarily with recruiting. If Ohio State didn't have Judkins, for example, they just run Henderson and throw the ball to their 3 future NFL WRs more.
Instead, Georgia had more portal guys as Ohio State did! It is just that the guys that UGA brought in got into trouble - RaRa Thomas, Colbie Young - or weren't difference makers: Trevor Etienne, Dominic Lovett, London Humphreys, Ben Yurosek. Also, UGA's inability to get big time offensive talent to transfer in predates NIL and also predates the portal. You can call it an extension of their inability to land big time recruits at RB and WR since getting Dom Blaylock, George Pickens, James Cook and Zamir White years ago. Although, I will say that Smart's sudden ability to clean up all the top high school WRs in the state of Georgia after years of just letting them waltz out of state makes me think that UGA"s offensive struggles the last 2 seasons (last year when McConkey and Bowers were hurt and all of this year) caused a philosophy change. Smart has always been capable of recruiting guys like that. He apparently didn't think that he needed them to win until now.
love the dawgs but think we may be way over-rated
Well, I don't know that I'd call those last two wins "dominant," certainly not the one against Texas. They happened to start playing a lot better at the very end than they had all season. With this new, widely expanded playoff field, I guess that's the new definition of "the best team."
And time will tell, but it might not be a simple matter of willingness when it comes to Georgia being able to just buy the kind of team you're talking about.
To me—this is insanity. All of these big universities are literally "buying" their football talent. This is what's happening—the richest schools with a gratuitous board, willing to spend the most money paying for football players, are going to win all the games and all the championships. How much fun is that? It's gone from who has the best players who want to play ball and matriculate at your school to "our slush fund is bigger than your slush fund". Just how many NFLs do we need? One is enough. People in power and with influence need to look around and see that this is killing "COLLEGE" football as we know it. Somebody or some entity needs to put some kind of limits on this BS! Carson Beck is going to make MORE nest year playing for a major university than he could've made in the NFL!! What's wrong with this picture?
Eh, the odds makers are just looking to have rough estimates of betting pools and will be based on rankings. Remember the rankings to start the season:
#5 Bama - #12
#6 Ole Miss - #14
#9 Michigan - unranked
#10 Florida State - unranked
#11 Missouri - #19
#12 Utah - unranked
#13 LSU - unranked
#15 Tennessee - #7
UNR Indiana - #8
UNR Boise State - #9
UNR SMU - #10
UNR Arizona State - #12
Top 3? Until we get a couple of decent offensive tackles, we’re not even a Top 10 program.
With the way it is now, I would be happy if the colleges would call their bluff & not play this game anymore. I would rather watch walkons/students than what we have now.
The pros can find another stadium and fund their own minor league system and deal with it all….iust like baseball.
Much rather watch and pull for players that love their school, state and are loyal. The passion & love for my team since childhood is slowly slipping away.
The '25 season is on the shoulders of Gunner Stockton. Did you watch last night? Will Howard was 14 completions in 15 attempts in the 1st half. Football is a QB league. CFB is a QB league. Alabama (#17??) beat UGA twice in '24 because? AL QB Jalen Milroe. If GS develops into a premier CFB QB UGA is a title favorite. If not '25 will look a lot like '24. As for OSU, it was the 1st team where buying the best NIL pieces assured a team of winning a championship. Very good recruiting plus cherry picking all Americans through NIL is what put OSU on top.
@E_Roc
Not quite what happened. Yes Ohio State went 11-2 in the regular season. One loss was 32-21 at 13-1 Oregon. (Oregon is infamously a different team at Autzen, especially at night.) The other was because Ryan Day made the idiotic decision to try to "send a message" to Michigan by showing that he could beat them at their own game. Turns out Michigan was a loaded and well coached team stuck with a difficult schedule and no QB. Day thought that if he got into trouble, he could just flip a switch, go back to his regular offense and still win. The problem: Michigan had the personnel and know-how to stop Ohio State's regular offense too. Meaning even if Ryan Day had taken the game seriously from the start, while Ohio State definitely would have won it still wouldn't have been easy. This Ohio State team wasn't as good as the one that UGA beat in 2022, or even as good as some of his earlier teams that were wasted on poorly coached defenses. But they were legitimately the best team against quite a challenging schedule this year.
@lucydog See what I told @MontanaDawg before: Dawgnation doing the "Ohio State NIL" thing is sour grapes. The Buckeyes only brought in 4 starters from the portal. Not only did Notre Dame have more than that, but UGA would have had the same had Rara Thomas and Colbie Young not gotten into trouble. UGA fans want to believe that Ohio State simply outbid UGA for Caleb Downs but I stated yesterday that in the SECCG Caleb Downs played against the guys that UGA was going to bring back on offense this year and knew that UGA without Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey wasn't going anywhere. One guy claimed that had Caleb Downs come to UGA, UGA would have won a title. I asked: "so, was Caleb Downs going to be like Travis Hunter and play both offense and defense? WR (or RB) and safety?" That question didn't go over well, but UGA already has several future NFL DBs in their secondary. Upgrading Dan Jackson - who may actually be a 6th or 7th round pick himself - with Caleb Downs wouldn't have given UGA a 2021 or 2022 defense, and even with those defenses, UGA still needed a good offense to beat Alabama and Ohio State those years.
@benzone…Good points. Other than a very few players, UGA has not really benefitted highly from the portal. Etienne was the best transfer by far. BUT, the Buckeyes used their NIL/Collective money to not only get those (4) VERY key players but also to give some monies to others who were considering leaving to the NFL or otherwise. So it's not just getting transfer players, it's having the NIL $$ to keep some of the key players you will need as well to make it an Ohio State-Championship-calibre-team. From what I have read it sounds like Georgia just simply does not have those kind of deep pockets, so Kirby will be challenged to keep guys and get transfers with a much more limited NIL budget. This will be the challenge for most teams.
Recruiting well in the future obviously isn't enough. More emphasis needs to be placed on retaining top talent pre portal and within third year draft eligibility. Ohio State had five notables added in the transfer portal. On top of that, they also had five guys who were high NFL draft stocks who could have declared after last season, but instead returned.