Some advanced stats from Saturday’s game. Nothing too surprising hidden in there, but one unit comes out looking a little better than the others.

• The saddest part is that the advanced stats only go two quarters deep. Nearly the entire second half was garbage time.
• Georgia’s run defense played fairly well. There were breakdowns of course like Henry’s touchdown run, but on the whole the secondary had a much worse day. (This isn’t shown in the stats, but I thought Georgia did an excellent job at sniffing out the few jet sweeps Alabama tried.)
• Though the teams were about equally poor on third down, Alabama had a higher overall success rate on all downs. That means they did their damage largely on first or second down.
• If it wasn’t the roughest passing performance since Hines Ward was thrown to the wolves against Alabama in 1995, it’s right up there.
• Wunderlich observes that Georgia “doesn’t have a really great receiver either outside of Mitchell.” That’s not a bombshell – with Scott-Wesley out, it’s been up to guys like Davis and McKenzie to take on larger roles. Godwin is promising and has already moved into that second spot. The glaring omission here is the absence of tights ends and fullbacks. Georgia’s depth at the other skill positions was supposed to mitigate an inexperienced group of receivers. Welch was the only player from this group even targeted in the first half. It’s possible that Georgia had to keep the tight ends in for pass protection, but Alabama rarely brought pressure, relying on coverage to force Lambert to check down or scramble.

The bit at the end about Georgia’s talent not syncing up is a good one and something we’ve dealt with since Stafford, Moreno, and Green played on the same offense in 2008. Unfortunately that’s not going to begin to change until February (and then the next February…). The question now is whether Georgia can overcome those deficiencies so clearly exposed by Alabama to avoid a tailspin and get the team back on track towards its goals.