Dawgs Daily

Going Against the Grain: A Theme Georgia has Exemplified in 2022

Georgia muscled its way to another impressive season thus far and did so by redefining the current trends of college football.

Jonathan Williams

Looking back at where Georgia was before the 2022 college football season started, there were a lot of unknowns surrounding the program. The central question was how Georgia would respond after winning a national title, but it was much deeper than that. 

The Bulldogs had just lost 15 players to the NFL while also losing 13 more to the transfer portal. They also lost their defensive coordinator, wide receivers coach, defensive backs coach, and offensive line coach as well. So 28 players in total left the roster along with four different coaches on staff. Not an ideal scenario to be in, to say the least. 

The typical response to losing that many players in today's college football world would be to dip your hand into the portal and fill some roster spots from there. The current direction of the sport would say that's the easiest way to overcome a mass exodus like Georgia experienced. However, Georgia went a different route and did not take a single player from the transfer portal. 

Instead, Kirby Smart and his staff decided to roll with the current roster they had built and developed. Losing eight starters on defense is hard enough to overcome on its own, nonetheless with a young and inexperienced roster. It's the main reason why a drop-off in production for Georgia was expected this season. 

Well, that wasn't the case for Georgia. Through 13 games, the Bulldogs posted the second-best scoring defense in the country, averaged 39.2 points per game on offense, and seventh in total yards on offense. Those results helped lead Georgia to a conference title and the top seed in the college football playoff. 

It's very rare for a college team to have as much success as Georgia has this season after losing so many players from the roster. In fact, history would say that what Georgia has accomplished this season is impossible when you look at how other teams fared after putting up a record number draft class.

No other team has managed to pull off the type of season that Georgia has put together this season. Making it back to the college football playoff during these circumstances is an accomplishment on its own, and Smart doing it with the same roster he started the offseason with is an even bigger flex. 

It has been a season of redefining the current college football trends for Georgia. A former walk-on quarterback became a Heisman trophy finalist, posted undefeated regular season records in back-to-back seasons, claimed the No. 1 spot in the college football playoff, and now has a chance to become the first team in playoff history to win consecutive titles. It's as if Georgia was handed a puzzle with no matching pieces but still formulated a masterpiece despite being in a situation where none of it was supposed to come together. 

While success at the University of Georgia has become the norm, this type of success is far from it. The obstacles that the Bulldogs have had to overcome this season is something that no other team before them has been able to do and they might just cap it off with the biggest grand slam of them all when the season finally comes to a finish. 

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Jonathan Williams
JONATHAN WILLIAMS

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