A few weeks ago I wondered what a postseason home game would look like. Hopefully Georgia will earn a bye and the high seed that comes with an auto bid, but the possibility of getting an at-large bid has to be considered. When Georgia has hosted NCAA postseason events in other sports, those games have often been ticketed through a separate process without much regard to how tickets were issued during the regular season. Would it be the same for Sanford Stadium if Georgia hosted a first-round CFP game? Would it resemble a true home game, or would the CFP allocate tickets themselves?

To the athletic department’s credit, we know those answers before the season starts. Season ticket holders recently received a postcard outlining exactly how it will work. Some key points:

• Season ticket holders will have the first right to purchase “their” seats for a CFP home game.
• It’s all or nothing – you either buy all of your seats or forfeit them for this game. (No buying only two tickets of a four seat block.)
• Once season ticket holders accept or decline their seats, the remainder will be available based on the priority system.
• There is no distribution process for an away CFP game. They expect the visitor allotment to be small enough not to bother with.

No surprise: there is nothing about pricing. It’s likely the tickets will be priced at usual CFP levels, and those high prices might influence whether season ticket holder with large blocks decide to opt in.

This system seems about as fair as it could be. It should be reassuring to season ticket holders who might have worried about getting pushed out of seeing a home playoff game. You’ll pay for the right to be there, but you’ll still have first say.

As a bonus the postcard also included the 2024 postseason donation requirements and ticket quantities. We know what it will take to qualify for tickets to the SEC championship, the CFP, and any other bowl game. Of course games held in Atlanta (SECCG and the CFP quarterfinal at the Peach Bowl) will have the highest cutoff levels. Fans have until November 1st to add to their cumulative donation.

It’s that time of year again – Georgia’s roster is set and full. The 85 Bulldog scholarship players will come from among these 87. (Dan Jackson, a possible starter at safety, is not counted.)

It’s the final year of Covid eligibility rules. Brinson, Truss, and Stackhouse took advantage of an additional year of eligibility, so Georgia will have 12 seniors. That’s an increase from 9 seniors in 2023 and 2022, but the bigger picture hasn’t changed. Georgia had 28 juniors and seniors in 2023, and they’ll have 26 in 2024. The 36 freshmen and redshirt freshmen make up over 40% of the team – second only to the 38 in 2022. But 17 of those 38 freshmen in 2022 are no longer with the program, so Georgia only has 14 juniors this season. The Dawgs won’t have to start any freshmen in 2024 barring injury, but you can see several opportunities for playing time at certain positions.

Large incoming classes at defensive back and offensive line were needed to refill those positions which could be facing some depth issues after 2024. Georgia only took a handful of transfers this year, and they were primarily on the offensive side of the ball.

(Players are listed by class. Possible Day-One starters in a base formation are in bold – just a best guess. [R] indicates a player who has redshirted. Transfers are italicized.)

First, get a load of the new court. Reaction has been enthusiastic – it looks as if the redesign hit the right notes. One underrated design choice was the use of the collegiate block letters on the baseline from the popular retro uniforms rather than the modernized font.

Coach Abe got some fantastic news this week with a commitment from 5’11” guard Aubrey Beckham. Beckham, a 2025 prospect from Hebron Christian Academy in Dacula, is rated as the #30 prospect in the nation by ESPN.

The commitment is significant on many levels. Most important of course is that she can play a valuable position well. She’d be the highest-rated prospect to play for Georgia in several seasons. Beckham is touted as a “floor general” who can lead Georgia’s offensive attack. With how much of Coach Abe’s offense depends on a steady player in command like Diamond Battles or Asia Avinger, it’s easy to see how a talented guard like Beckham could thrive in this system.

Beckham’s commitment also represents an important milestone for Coach Abe’s recruiting. If she takes the court in 2025, she’ll be the first Lady Dog freshman from the state of Georgia since Jillian Hollingshead in 2021. She’d be Coach Abe’s first signee from Georgia and just her second player from the state. (De’Mauri Flournoy transferred in from Vanderbilt shortly after Coach Abe was hired.) Georgia has always been a national program with greats like Katrina McClain, Saudia Roundtree, Kelly and Coco Miller, and Deanna Nolan hailing from out of state. There’s always been room though for some of the state’s best talent. Angel Robinson, Ashley Houts, Tasha Humphries, and of course Teresa Edwards were must-have in-state prospects. Those foundational players have been heading elsewhere recently.

Coach Abe had to fill a depleted roster any way she could, and her staff did not have deep ties to the state of Georgia. She leaned on the connections she brought from UCF while her recruiting operation in Georgia had to be built from the ground up. It hasn’t been easy nor fruitful. Relationships that lead to commitments can take years to develop even with prospects within the state. Take Essence Cody, a talented player from Georgia now at Alabama. Cody began receiving offers and developing relationships with programs since the 8th grade – well before Abe took over at Georgia. Making things more difficult was the inability to host camps which are invaluable opportunities to get elite prospects on campus and sell the program. The triple whammy of the Covid pandemic, the coaching transition in 2022, and Stegeman Coliseum roof construction in 2023 meant that until 2024 Georgia had been unable to host summer camps since 2019.

Perhaps the commitment of Beckham shows that things are beginning to change. Georgia was clearly on the mind of more top prospects after camp season this summer, and several will take visits this fall. Director of Recruiting Operations Brianna Patton recently returned back to Georgia from a successful stint at Ole Miss and is already paying dividends.

It’s unreasonable to put the pressure on Beckham to be the pied piper leading other elite prospects to Georgia, but she is the kind of player and leader on the court that other good players would want to play with. Georgia has added five top-100 signees over the past two years, and now they’re beginning to attract that kind of talent from Georgia. If Beckham’s commitment is a sign that Georgia is making inroads with the depth of talent in this state, the difficult task of returning Georgia back to the top of the SEC will seem much more likely to succeed.

There are many Kirby-isms that have become lore among Georgia fans. “You’re either elite or you’re not.” “Keep chopping wood.” But one lesser-repeated line from a 2022 press conference might rise above them all to define Kirby Smart’s Georgia program.

“We built a program to be sustained.”

Following the 2021 national title season, Smart asserted during the 2022 SEC Media Days that his program wasn’t a flash in the pan. “We didn’t build this program on hoping for one-year wonders. We built a program to be sustained. This program was built to be here for a long time.”

Smart didn’t waste time backing up his words. The Bulldogs repeated as national champions and followed up with a top three finish in 2023. Now entering the expanded playoff era, Seth Emerson reflects on that sustainability when he concludes that “no college football team in America seems better positioned for the new era than Georgia.”

There’s no need to rehash the personnel and program strengths that have Georgia near or at the top of every preseason poll. (Though they should never be taken for granted either.) Georgia isn’t scrambling to find a quarterback or guys who can run, catch, block, or tackle. No team is perfect, and but Georgia’s concerns are now first-world problems at the margins of performance and mental toughness. Even as Smart sustains the program at a high level, that success at the margins can determine which seasons end with titles and which come up just short. It’s worth spending a few lines on what might threaten Georgia’s high level of success in the 2024 season.

You know what they say about “assume”

Emerson identifies a few of those threats, and the first is complacency or entitlement. The season’s slogan “assume nothing” is the response. Georgia might be set up for long-term success, but it has to be earned every year from the ground up. That’s been a consistent message from Smart even after a championship. Coming off a season that fell short of a national or SEC title, there is no reason for anyone to be satisfied or complacent. TE coach Todd Hartley illustrates how the ingrained focus on process helps to put the “assume nothing” slogan into practical terms. “When you’re not thinking about the outcomes and you’re focusing on the process, you don’t even think about (everything else)” – the playoff, the SEC, or the 12-game grind. If each game is a new test of the team’s preparation and standard of execution, there’s no point in looking down the road or being satisfied with the last result.

What do you do well?

“Assume nothing” goes beyond mindset to execution from week to week. We take certain things as givens entering the season. A Kirby Smart team will always have a good defense. The Dawgs are loaded on the edge. Carson Beck has command of the offense. There is veteran experience on the defensive line, and the offensive line should contend for the Joe Moore Award. The key to any successful season is to make sure the strengths perform like strengths while improving weaknesses. What happens when our assumptions are tested?

The offense, as good as it was all regular season, hit a wall against Alabama, literally and figuratively, because it couldn’t run the ball. That shouldn’t have been a problem in that game, but it was, and now Georgia has less experience at tailback, banking on Florida transfer Trevor Etienne and a host of sophomores and freshmen.

That observation hits on two areas. Georgia’s offensive line is touted as a strength, and it must consistently play like one. Alabama was able to control the line of scrimmage with just a four-man rush, and things only got worse once Mims was out of the game. Bama’s defensive front was talented and better than any Georgia saw in 2023, but the challenges for the offensive line are more likely to be on that end of the spectrum in 2024 given the quality of teams Georgia must face.

There’s a larger issue: explosiveness. Alabama made a coverage adjustment after Georgia’s opening scoring drive, and – aside from a 50-yard pass to Arian Smith in the 3rd quarter – largely bottled up the Bulldog offense. Yes, Georgia struggled to run the ball, but the combination of Alabama’s effective pass rush and split safeties controlling the middle of the field took away big plays in the passing game. It mattered that Bowers and McConkey, two of Georgia’s most explosive receiving threats, were hampered by injuries, and their limitations gave Alabama confidence in their adjustment.

Here’s the thing, though – Bowers, McConkey, and in total four of the top five receivers from 2023 are gone. That explosiveness will have to come from elsewhere. Dillon Bell emerged as a playmaker late in the season. We know all about Arian Smith’s speed, but can he be more than the guy who gets targeted deep two or three times a game? Dominick Lovett has been a productive receiver for two SEC programs and should have a major role. There is depth at tight end. It’s not just talent. Beck clearly had a comfort level with Bowers and McConkey. Developing that connection and instinct with a new group of go-to receivers takes work and time. Scattered practice and scrimmage reports suggest that work might still be ongoing.

Finishing the season

You’ve heard plenty about Georgia’s schedule, but it’s unusual to see a valid point that doesn’t relate to Alabama or Texas:

The part that on paper gives Smart the most heartburn is November: Florida isn’t expected to be very good, but it’s still the Cocktail Party, and then Georgia has to turn around and go to Ole Miss. Then a week after that is a home game against Tennessee, which could be problematic. It’s a month — and a season — where Georgia’s depth will be tested.

That’s not to disrespect the challenge of playing at Texas and Alabama or the need to stay focused week to week against opponents like Clemson, Kentucky, and Auburn. But think about the state of Georgia’s team last November. Bowers and McConkey were dinged up. Dumas-Johnson had a broken arm, and, as we learned later, Mondon played injured the entire season. Mims was never quite at full strength after ankle surgery and took himself out of the SEC championship game. Every team is banged up to some extent at the end of the season, and Georgia wasn’t spared. The schedule was forgiving enough for the Bulldogs to navigate the regular season unscathed, but the wear and tear of even a lesser schedule mattered in Atlanta.

Smart earlier this month addressed concerns with his team’s depth, and you’d expect those issues to begin showing up later in the season. Late-season depth concerns matter more now for teams with national title aspirations: with a potential for 16 or even 17 games due to the expanded playoff, over half of the national champion’s games will occur after November 1st. If Georgia emerges from its difficult regular season as a championship contender, in what shape will the team be entering the postseason?

Kirby Smart raised some eyebrows discussing the state of his roster this week.

“I feel like we have less depth than we’ve ever had,” he claimed. “And that’s kind of a common theme talking to other coaches I talk to. I call it the deterioration of football.”

Hearing Smart fret about depth sends many fans one of two ways. You have those who laugh it off – there goes Kirby again channeling his inner Dooley and fighting complacency. Then there’s the twinge of panic. Depth? What happened to all of those signing classes? Why don’t we have any players? Are they all busts?

It makes a little more sense when Smart explains what he means by “depth.” Of course Georgia doesn’t lack for talented athletes with high ceilings. He’s also not poor-mouthing his roster. Smart elaborated, “Every year we’ve been here, I feel like we’ve had more players capable of going in and playing winning football, and every year that (number) goes down. So, we have to keep working to increase that number….We have less guys that know and execute our system.”

In that light “depth” is the set of players Smart considers able to execute Georgia’s system to his standard (“winning football.”) In Smart’s view, that set is in danger of shrinking year over year even as the talent level remains high. That’s an important and real distinction. We saw a gifted athlete like C.J. Allen do amazing things as a true freshman, but we also saw him forced into learning on the job at times. The concern is that injuries and other factors might force a coach’s hand as the pool of players ready to perform to Georgia’s standard decreases, and that could lead to a less effective unit on the field. In other words, deterioration.

Smart suggests a few root causes. There’s the transfer portal, sure, and players transferring into a new system will always have a learning curve. But Georgia has had the luxury of being selective in its use of the portal, and those transfers aren’t often viewed as developmental projects. Another issue Smart raises is players arriving at the next level less prepared than their predecessors because “their practice regimen and practice schedule is tougher” now in high school. Certainly someone who has been at the forefront of the recruiting game for 20 years and himself grew up around the high school coaching environment would have finely-tuned insight into the development and readiness of high school prospects.

The upcoming roster limit expansion from 85 to 105 doesn’t necessarily help things. A larger pool of players at the same state of development doesn’t change the roster’s quality or give Smart the depth he’s looking for. Meanwhile the portal and NIL make it more difficult concentrate “winning football” players on a handful of rosters. That’s good for the competitiveness of the sport, but of course it makes Smart’s job more difficult. Not only is there increased competition to recruit the fewer game-ready players, there’s also a greater risk of players transferring out after putting in the work to build depth.

The “good” news, as Smart points out, is that everyone is facing this challenge – some more than others. “It’s not as much quality depth that I’m used to, but we probably have more than a lot of people.” Advantage is always relative, and Georgia’s roster is still in good relative shape even as the nature of player development evolves throughout the sport.

Seth Emerson raises an issue that might snap into focus later in the season. The road to the SEC championship hasn’t just changed; it’s not even possible to define. In the past the goal was easy to define: win the division. A team played everyone else in its division, so each team had a considerable amount of control in its place in the divisional standings. With a fairly straightforward road through the SEC East over the past few years, Georgia’s seasons could be framed almost from the outset as preparation for the eventual postseason challenges. But divisions are gone, and that has implications for how each team must navigate the regular season. Now the SEC championship game will match the two teams out of 16 with the best conference records. Each of those 16 teams will have a unique set of eight SEC opponents. That eight-game SEC schedule ensures each team will only see a little over half of the rest of the conference.

As Emerson notes, that structure opens the door for some chaos in everything from determining the title game participants to which SEC teams might get a playoff invitation. Enough has been said about Georgia’s difficult schedule, but there’s enough variance in who-plays-whom for a number of teams to envision a path to Atlanta if there aren’t a pair of 8-0 juggernauts sitting atop the standings. The tidy seven-team round-robin division schedule often provided enough head-to-head tiebreakers to sort things out on each side of the conference, but there will be fewer head-to-head matchups in a larger pool of 16 teams. Emerson illustrates how murky things could get. “You may notice that neither LSU nor Missouri has to play Georgia or Texas. In fact, a number of the projected top teams don’t play each other. Alabama and Texas don’t play. Neither do Ole Miss and Texas or Alabama and Ole Miss.” Georgia will have no question about the postseason if the Bulldogs survive their difficult schedule with an 8-0 conference record. But at 7-1?

The nervous-laughter part of this is that the actual tiebreaker structure is still largely a work in progress. It’s reasonable that head-to-head will remain atop the list, but we’ll have fewer of those scenarios. After that? The season might get underway with that question unanswered. And while the eventual system will have its critics and backers, it’s not a great idea to start playing without knowing the rules. If nothing else, dragging it out opens the door to gripes about favoring certain outcomes.

UPDATE: We have a tiebreaker format! The SEC announced the procedures on August 21st. Nothing too controversial if you’ve ever paid attention to a tiebreaking process for one of the SEC’s other sports like basketball. Key point: it’s a big advantage (as it should be) to knock off a team high in the standings. It’s also interesting that scoring margin will matter if things get too far into the weeds.

One other angle Emerson raises: the CFP doesn’t care how the SEC breaks its ties. The SEC runner-up isn’t guaranteed a spot in the playoff and might not even be the second or third-best team in the league in the eyes of the playoff committee and its metrics. Just because the mechanics of a tiebreaker place a certain team atop a group with identical records, the committee doesn’t have to accept that ordering. In that event, an additional loss in the title game might push the SEC runner-up out of the playoff if it entered the postseason tied with one or two other teams.

But college football has never produced that kind of chaos before, right?

Another postseason change that won’t matter until it does: we know the first round of the CFP will be hosted by teams seeded 5-8. What I haven’t seen though is much discussion of the details. For the teams, it’s enough to say it’s a home game in their own stadiums. How about for the fans? Will each school decide its own ticketing policy? Would a school like Georgia ticket the event like another home game with season ticket holders having first shot at “their” seats? Would there be a full student section? Or would the CFP have some say in a share of tickets for visiting fans, its sponsors, or even the general public? I’m sure I’m overthinking things here, but it would be quite a shock for a fan excited about attending a home CFP game to be thrown back into the priority system used for any other postseason game. Again – it would be nice to have clarity and know the rules before we get to that point.