UGA’s ‘decent’ defense might not be good enough

Athens — Georgia coach Mark Richt gets pretty defensive when it comes to his defense. He certainly was on Tuesday.

“I think the main thing that we’ve got to remember is seven points were scored [by South Carolina],” Richt said. “That’s pretty sporty. I’m not concerned. I’m actually pretty excited about what’s been going on on defense.”

The Bulldogs were sliced and diced by the Gamecocks for 166 passing yards in the fourth quarter of this past Saturday’s game. Most of those yards came on the Gamecocks’ final two drives when Georgia lined up in a three-man front — a tackle on the center and the two ends split wide — on six of eight plays before safety Reshad Jones’ interception preserved the 14-7 win.

Defensive coordinator Willie Martinez was asked if he played too conservatively late in the game.

“No, because we bring pressure out of that,” he said. “You ask enough offensive guys, they don’t know where the pressure is going to come from. It’s really a 3-4 defense. There could be eight guys coming or seven guys coming. There’s some illusion to it, too.”

Perhaps, but Chris Smelley wasn’t fooled. It was the Gamecocks’ sophomore quarterback, who opened the season as a backup, who was dissecting the Bulldogs’ defense like someone would a frog in a biology lab. Saturday, Georgia will face a relative professor in Arizona State quarterback Rudy Carpenter.

Carpenter is one of only five four-year starting quarterbacks in America. The 6-foot-3, 225-pound recent graduate is the active Pac-10 leader in pass attempts, completions, yards, touchdown passes and 300-yard games. He’ll soon overtake John Elway in career passing yards (9,349) and Carson Palmer in career TD passes (72) in Pac-10 history. The Bulldogs can only hope it won’t happen against them. Carpenter needs 376 yards and two TDs, respectively.

Suffice it to say, Carpenter is really, really good.

“His stats speak for themselves,” Georgia senior defensive end Jeremy Lomax said. “He’s a great quarterback. It’s a matter of getting pressure on him.”

Said sophomore linebacker Rennie Curran: “We definitely feel like that’s gonna be a big part of our success, how much we get to him, how much we fly around the ball. That’s one of the adjustments we have to make as a defense, we want to make the quarterback flinch.”

Therein lies the problem. Pressure definitely helps but, if the Bulldogs’ first three games are any indication, they probably need to blitz to create it. And according to Richt, Carpenter is at his best against the blitz.

“Rudy is outstanding against the blitz,” Richt said. “His pass percentage actually goes up when people blitz him. That’s because he knows what to do. The more you rush the less you have to cover.

“If you have a quarterback and a system that he understands real well, blitzing might be the worst thing you can do.”

So the reality is you will probably see more of the same from the Bulldogs’ defense on Saturday. That is, they will play a lot of straight-up 4-3 with two-deep, zone coverage. That has been pretty effective early in games.

Consider that South Carolina had only 119 yards — or about 39 per quarter — before Saturday’s final 15 minutes. And Georgia completely stuffed the run. Its ranked 12th nationally against the rush.

“For three quarters I think we were doing really well,” senior cornerback Asher Allen said. “But I think the last quarter they were able to obviously get some mismatches and things like that and use [tight end Jared Cook] more, which is going to be a mismatch for anybody. They were able to move the ball, but I think that we did decent for the majority of the game.”

This time, however, decent might not get it.