Georgia Makes Strong Argument for College Football Playoff Inclusion After Committee Snub

The Bulldogs took care of business against Tennessee, putting six SEC teams in contention for the playoff now.

Georgia linebacker Chris Cole celebrates after recovering fumble late in the game against Tennessee. / Joshua L. Jones / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The beauty of a 12-team College Football Playoff is that it creates more opportunity for more teams and more excitement for more fans. It’s triple the fun from the four-team days. 

The less beautiful side effect of a 12-team playoff is that it expands the arguing and complaining by equal measure. And we are hitting the contentious stretch run. So it fell to Georgia Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart late Saturday night, after his team’s biggest win in two years, to tell the playoff selection committee what it’s missing in assessing his team.

“I don’t know what they’re looking for, I really don’t,” Smart said after Georgia beat the Tennessee Volunteers, 31–17, in a make-or-break game for the Dawgs from a playoff perspective. “I wish they could really define the criteria. I wish they could do the eyeball test where you come down here and look at the people we’re playing against. You can’t see that stuff on TV. … They’re not in that environment. They’re not at Ole Miss playing against that defense.”

Of course, the committee cannot be in Oxford, Miss., on a given Saturday. Nor could it be in Eugene, Ore., in October when the Ohio State Buckeyes played the Oregon Ducks. Or in Dallas when the BYU Cougars beat the SMU Mustangs in September. Darn the luck, the committee cannot simply pick a location and show up on the sideline to apply the old eyeball test.

Smart continued: “We’re trying to be a really good quality team that’s not on this emotional roller coaster that’s controlled by people in a room somewhere that may not understand football like we do as coaches. … It’s different in our league.”

It’s different in our league is going to be the rallying cry for the cluster of Southeastern Conference teams jockeying to get into the playoff. There are six in contention now, down from eight heading into Saturday. Three or four are likely to make the final bracket, with the strength-of-schedule drumbeats destined to grow louder as we get closer to Selection Sunday.

Committee chair Warde Manuel veered into the usual self-destructive territory last Tuesday when discussing the Bulldogs, declaring their offense has been inconsistent. Manuel and past CFP chairs are given a thankless task doing the meaningless weekly rankings and having to discuss them afterward. They can only talk themselves into trouble, never out of it, and they routinely make the mistake of trying to talk like football experts when the job is to appraise résumés.

With two losses on the résumé—most recently an 18-point beating at Mississippi—Georgia was in trouble heading into this game. 

One week after being pushed down to No. 12 in the CFP rankings and outside the bracket—Boise State, at No. 13, would be guaranteed a spot as the highest-ranked Group of 5 conference champion—the Bulldogs faced a must-win game. They’d been criticized by their own fans and the media over the past week following the punking at Ole Miss—nobody more so than quarterback Carson Beck, who seemed to be buckling as the season went along.

At 7–2, the Dawgs had their worst nine-game record since 2020. One more loss and they’d be all but eliminated from the playoff, which would have been a massive pratfall for the preseason No. 1 team and the national champions from ’21 and ’22.

Today, the dynasty is off its death bed. Georgia was not going to go down easily. Not at home, not against an opponent it has owned, not with its vast reservoir of talent and pride.

It goes into the record books as an eighth straight beating of the Vols by two touchdowns or more. But here between the hedges, Georgia was between a rock and a hard place early.

The negative vibes from Oxford transferred to Athens for the first quarter. Georgia produced just one first down in its first three possessions. Tennessee sprinted to a 10–0 lead, and it might have been 14–0 if Australian punter Brett Thorson didn’t make a touchdown-saving tackle.

Beck continued his laborious play, completing just two of his first nine passes. Everything was going perfectly miserably until the final play of the first quarter, when Beck fired a third-and-8 pass over the middle to Dominic Lovett for a 38-yard gain.

Just like that, the cloud lifted over the Dawgs. Confidence can be an amazingly fickle thing in athletics, and it was like Beck just needed one good play to snap him out of a four-game funk in which he committed 10 turnovers. 

Two plays after that liberating throw, Beck scrambled for 14 yards. Then he rifled a 19-yard touchdown pass to tight end Oscar Delp. The Georgia offense was back in gear, on its way to scoring on four straight possessions and taking a 24–17 lead in the third quarter. The Dawgs tacked on one more score in the fourth, inflicting pain once again on a Tennessee program that has a chronic silver-and-black problem.

Beck finished with 347 yards passing and 379 in total offense, with a pass efficiency rating of 151.87—his highest in more than a month. In a must-win game, he played up to the moment.

“Just have fun, let it loose,” Beck said he told his teammates this week. “We don’t have anything to lose at this point.”

Perhaps the urgency of the moment was liberating—at least after that first big play. Center Jared Wilson said Beck was a different guy than he’d been recently.

“I hadn’t seen that Carson Beck in a couple weeks, honestly,” Wilson said.

Beck made throws. His tight ends, Delp, Ben Yurosek and Lawson Luckie, made catches (a combined 10 for 130 yards). Offensive coordinator Mike Bobo, a frequent target for fan outrage, “dialed it up,” according to Smart. A chronically puny running game budged out 106 yards. A banged-up offensive line surrendered no sacks.

It was a get-well game at just the right time, and it should easily elevate Georgia back into the playoff bracket this week. The only two-loss team that should be ahead of the Bulldogs is Ole Miss. We’ll see how many one-loss teams are ahead of the Bulldogs, too.

“Everybody thinks we should win every game,” Smart said. “I’m very proud of this team. We’ve played the toughest schedule in our league.”

That’s certainly true, at least among the remaining contenders. Road games at Alabama, Texas and Ole Miss are quite the gauntlet. This was Georgia’s first home game since Oct. 12, a point Smart made more than once in the last week.

It was a make-or-break moment against a quality opponent, and Georgia did what it had to do. Tennessee (8–2) now is the team dispatched onto the playoff bubble. The lobbying, arguing and complaining will continue—but if the Bulldogs keep winning, it will end all arguments.