From July 15, 2008:

I can’t imagine any thinking Bulldog out there who could buy into this Georgia National Championship hype. I am as excited as anybody about this season and think CMR will have a very good team, but our friends in the media are setting up the Bulldog Nation for a fall. Articles like Mark Bradley’s in the AJC over the weekend and Tony Barnhart’s today are typical setups that I’ve seen time and time again from media types in all sorts of endeavors. Set expectations unrealistically high, then declare the season a failure when these totally unrealistic expectations aren’t met.

The reason this happens is simple: a team meeting its realistic expectations isn’t news! So we’ll just have to live with it in the media. It will get worse. Much worse.

Jeff Schultz’s Sunday column is only the most recent of the woe-is-Georgia media types proclaiming their disappointment, or rather Georgia’s disappointment, in how this season has turned out.  Has it been a less than successful season?  No doubt.  Has it been a disappointing season?  Perhaps, taking into account that the team and its fans have absorbed two of the most bitter defeats in the history of the program (the Florida loss supplanting this, and the Alabama loss supplanting that).

But I realized Saturday after the Auburn win that what we’re dealing with is simply a team that has a definitive playing personality.  They go out there unprepared, fool around, make a few big plays, give up a lot of yards, idiotic penalties, abysmal special teams, and then somehow pull out a win against any competition that’s not in the Top 5.  That’s just the way it is.

I, like you, figured that at some point, a la 2007, the switch would come on and the team would commence running all over everybody, but that didn’t happen for one particular reason, which I’ll get into shortly.  But back to July 15:

Personally, I really would be surprised if Georgia makes it through September undefeated. One of Steve Spurrier, Arizona State, or Alabama is going to slip in and beat Georgia unless the team is ready for 60 minutes of hell in all three games….

October looks to feature another loss among Tennessee, LSU, or Florida. If you have given our boys a better shot at LSU because of their situation at quarterback, read SMQ’s somewhat obligatory assessment and rethink. And if the team emerges unscathed from September, and they have an off week to read about how great they are, a letdown against Tennessee is virtually assured, the only question will be whether they can win despite the letdown (see Kentucky, 2007). Florida needs no introduction.

Really, these were very un-bold predictions for anybody who has been paying attention.  South Carolina ended up being a pretty good team, as did, uh, Alabama.  Arizona State got caught looking ahead to Georgia and paid big time, and the ASU game was, unfortunately it turned out, the best effort the team put forth all season.  Georgia played just good enough to start believing their press clippings and, as it always goes when that happens, expected to win via showing up despite a team across the field with bigger, deeper lines of scrimmage on both sides of the ball and a senior QB.

Florida did this year what Georgia did in 2007 and what we expected Georgia would do after the Alabama debacle.  Florida put it all together after a shocking defeat and will win the national championship this year, no question.  But as we kicked off the Tennessee game we didn’t realize that the team that slopped through the South Carolina game was the team we’d get all year.  It is plausible, though not probable, that after the Alabama defeat the team, after so much hype, started mailing it in because the MNC was off the table.  I completely disagree–the die had been cast weeks before Bama.  Back to July 15:

November looks to be easier, but with Auburn you never can tell, and every July any thinking Bulldog puts this game as 50-50 at best no matter what.

Any win on the road in the SEC is a big win.  Any win over Auburn is a big win.  Jeff Schultz, for one, and anybody else with any familiarity with the Georgia-Auburn rivalry, knows that the game is the most throw-out-the-recordbooks rivalry in the SEC, possibly in all of college football.  The goal every year is to do exactly what Georgia accomplished Saturday:  escape with the win, no matter how ugly, and by any means necessary.  That, in my mind, makes the win over 5-5 Auburn the biggest win of the year so far.  Bigger than LSU, bigger than Arizona State.  However:

I for one am glad to see seven very losable games on the Dawgs schedule. Losing 3 of these 7 is a definite possiblity and would be a respectable campaign (depending on exactly how the Dawgs go about losing those games). Winning 5 of those 7 would yield a great season and a New Year’s Day bowl bid. Heck, if they lose the right two, they could still end up on top of the East. Winning 6 would virtually assure a spot in the Dome, but winning 6 (or 7) will require one (or two) of those Belue-to-Scott, Greene-to-Johnson miracle plays that go down in history. Usually though, it takes at least one miracle play to simply make it to the Dome from the East.

So forget about national championships. The only thing that matters is whether Georgia can beat Steve Spurrier after taking care of business in weeks 1 & 2. Then, and only then, will Thinking Bulldogs concern themselves with the most important goal for the team this year: winning the SEC East. That is the true, and realistic, goal for the season. 

So, with the SEC East out the window, we’re looking at either a less-than-respectable campaign (blowout losses to Bama and UF, loss to Tech), or “a great season and a New Year’s Day bowl bid.”  Anybody should be happy with 10-2 against the toughest schedule in the country, bragging rights on Steve Spurrier, Tennessee, LSU, Auburn & Tech, and a win on the road against a PAC-10 team, and the 2 losses coming against top 5 teams.  So, the difference between beating and losing to Tech is mammoth.  The Tech game this year is much more important to Georgia than it is to Tech, without question.

So, what happened?  Pay no attention to the noise.  It was not penalties, or poor kickoff coverage, or a decimated offensive line, or a letdown after the Alabama loss, or Willie Martinez.  We’ve gone 9-2 despite all of these factors.  The reason Georgia is scraping by teams that fans expect to beat handily, and the reason Georgia was not competitive against Bama and Florida, is the lack of takeaways on defense.  The reason for the lack of takeaways is the inability of the defensive line to pressure the opposing quarterbacks and blow up running plays at the line of scrimmage.  Losing Jeff Owens, the heart of the defense and especially the d-line, changed the entire complexion of the defense, and thereby the team, and thereby the season.  The play where Jeff Owens was lost for the season was the most important play of 2008, win or lose vs. the Humble Bumbles.