OXFORD, Miss. — Within moments, one goalpost succumbed and then the other. A light rain fell from the night sky. The thousands who had flooded the Vaught-Hemingway Stadium field roared their approval.
By this point, Georgia’s players and coaches had long since retreated to the locker room, ceding the field to the festive masses after No. 16 Ole Miss’ 28-10 upset of the No. 3 Bulldogs on Saturday night.
“It’s a little different,” Georgia safety Malaki Starks said. “That’s never happened to me before.”
What was hinted at in wins over Kentucky, Auburn, Mississippi State and Florida — when the Bulldogs could not match the dominating standards set by their predecessors of the past three seasons, two of them national-title winners — became clear-as-day fact in front of Ole Miss’ largest crowd (68,126) in its stadium’s history.
Welcome to the 2024 college football season, Georgia. No one is indomitable, not even the Bulldogs. Not only did Georgia lose to a non-Alabama team for the first time since the middle of the 2020 season, but it wasn’t close.
“They outplayed us (Saturday), outcoached us,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said. “They did a great job.”
The Bulldogs scored a touchdown on their opening possession, a score enabled by fortuitous field position after an Ole Miss turnover. Following that initial success, the Bulldogs scored three points over their final nine possessions (not counting a kneel-down to end the first half). Georgia’s total offense (245 yards) and yards-per-play average (3.8) were the lowest for the Bulldogs since 2017 (Smart’s second season), according to cfbstats.com data. The 10-point output tied for the low in Smart’s tenure.
“You look at their defense, they played a hell of a game,” quarterback Carson Beck said of the Rebels.
The Bulldogs’ defense was outclassed by an offense that came into the game ranked second in FBS in yards per game (555.4). Ole Miss targets worked themselves open on quick-hitting slants and downfield routes for quarterback Jaxson Dart, who completed 13 of 22 passes for 199 yards, one touchdown and one interception (the latter on the opening drive).
He proved equal to Smart’s assessment this past week of the Ole Miss offense in general and Dart in specific.
“They know, when you get in something, what beats that and they know how to attack that,” Smart said. “Proven winner, fierce competitor. He’s hard to stop.”
The Rebels finished with 397 yards of offense, averaging 6.2 yards per play. The yards-per-play rate was the second highest by a Georgia regular-season opponent since its dominating run began in the 2021 season. But, tellingly, the three highest yards-per-play games against Georgia in that span have all happened this season (Alabama, Mississippi State and Ole Miss).
After the first drive, when outside linebacker Chaz Chambliss sacked him, Dart threw from consistently clean pockets. In the second quarter, the Rebels were backed up on their 1-yard line. On first down, Dart dropped back to throw, standing patiently in the pocket in the end zone before throwing incomplete. On third-and-10, still at the 1, most teams would have surrendered and called for a safe run play to get the punt team room to throw.
But Ole Miss, in a show of confidence, called for another pass, daring Georgia to bring pressure. Dart hit a slant and completed a 16-yard pass for the first down. The drive finished with a field goal.
“That was gutsy for them to do that because we’re known to be an aggressive defense,” Georgia defensive lineman Nazir Stackhouse said.
It’s an odd reality to consider, but Georgia is fortunate that we’re in the debut season of the 12-team College Football Playoff. In the four-team era, the Bulldogs would have been eliminated with the loss.
But the gap that Georgia once owned over the rest of the SEC (except for Alabama) and college football has shrunk, its advantage and depth having been chipped away by the transfer portal and name, image and likeness deals that have lured players away from Athens. (An SEC schedule that included road games against three potential CFP teams — Texas, Alabama and Ole Miss — didn’t help, either.)
The Rebels defense that turned Georgia’s lights out Saturday was drastically enhanced by portal additions in the past offseason, an all-in bid by coach Lane Kiffin to build a team around the magnificent Dart in his final season. It was spurred in particular by Georgia’s 52-17 thrashing of his team a year ago in Athens.
“I told our team that I felt like they were probably the most talented team that we had played, counting both sides of the ball and special teams,” Smart said.
Now it gets interesting for the Bulldogs. At 7-2, it’s highly unlikely they can afford a third loss and make it into the College Football Playoff. No. 7 Tennessee will visit Sanford Stadium on Saturday. After UMass on Nov. 23, the Bulldogs will play Georgia Tech on the Friday after Thanksgiving. After the Yellow Jackets de-pantsed No. 4 Miami on Saturday, no one should be counting that game as a gimme for the Bulldogs, either. The sky isn’t falling, but Georgia is out of mulligans.
“I guess it is a different world in college football the way it is set up this year, and I think the teams that handle it the best will move on, and they’ll be the teams at the end,” Starks said. “We just want to be one of those.”
But, what a night for Ole Miss, which needed to win to stay in the CFP race. The game was considered the biggest of Kiffin’s five seasons and probably a span far longer than that. Before the game, anticipation built in the Grove, Ole Miss’ seen-to-be-believed tailgating village.
“I know my Ole Miss sports, but this is huge,” said Joe Yarber, a 70-year-old resident of Tupelo, Mississippi, who has held season tickets since 1980.
Yarber named a few games that compared but acknowledged the significance of Saturday for a team that last won a national championship in 1960 (by the NCAA’s purview) and hasn’t won an SEC title since 1963, the last time it finished in the top seven of the final AP poll.
“We’ve got a chance at the College Football Playoff,” he said. “How much bigger does it get than that?”
About six hours after he posed the question, two fallen goalposts offered a visual response that needed no explanation.
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