After an opening-day rout of Clemson stirred runaway optimism about Georgia’s football season, expectations were adjusted by Saturday’s 38-35 loss at South Carolina.
The loss sent the Bulldogs tumbling in the national rankings released Sunday, from No. 6 to No. 13 in the Associated Press poll and from No. 6 to No. 14 in the coaches’ poll. The loss also put Georgia at an early disadvantage in the SEC East, although the division race likely will remain in flux for a long while.
“We still have got a wonderful opportunity to win a lot of games and get right back to Atlanta (for the SEC Championship game),” Georgia coach Mark Richt said. “We know there’s a lot of football to be played yet.”
But on Sunday, Bulldog Nation was still dissecting the many twists and turns of the loss to South Carolina.
During his weekly teleconference with reporters, Richt was asked about two of the key plays in the game — an intentional-grounding call against Georgia quarterback Hutson Mason on first-and-goal from the South Carolina 4-yard line with about five minutes to play and an earlier holding penalty that negated a 54-yard touchdown run by Todd Gurley.
SEC coaches routinely ask the league office to look at video clips of calls that raise questions or concerns, and Richt indicated he’ll do so in both of those cases.
On the intentional-grounding penalty, Georgia coaches’ film review shows the ball “definitely hit the defender,” Richt said. “… As it deflected off the defender, it certainly looked like there was no one in the area where the ball landed, I know that. But if the ball didn’t get hit by the defender, it would have landed a lot closer to one of our eligible receivers, so I don’t know if we’d have got called for that or not. It’s a good question. … Right now I don’t know the answer to that, but we’re going to ask the question.”
And of the holding penalty against offensive lineman Brandon Kublanow, Richt said: “We thought Kublanow was in the framework of the defender, and we thought it was legal. What happened was, I don’t remember if it was one of his teammates or one of our guys, but somebody actually kind of clipped the back of the defender’s leg as they were running through there. … It looked like Kublanow kind of grabbed him and slung him to the ground, but in reality he got tripped up by someone behind him. So it may have appeared as if it was kind of a takedown, but I really don’t think it was. We’ll turn it in and see what they think after reviewing it.”
Whatever the SEC’s view of the plays, it won’t change anything about Saturday’s game, but Richt said “good honest feedback” is helpful for the league’s teams and officials.
The intentional-grounding issue would have been avoided, of course, if the Bulldogs had simply put the ball in star tailback Gurley’s hands after an interception/return/penalty gave them the ball at the 4-yard line, trailing 38-35. Instead, the pass play blew up on them, and three plays later Marshall Morgan missed a short field goal.
“That was interesting they ran that play, I guess,” South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier said.
“Yeah, if we had it to do again, we would have hammered it,” Richt said.
The game also left Georgia dealing with the issue of a shaky defense, which allowed South Carolina quarterback Dylan Thompson to complete 19 of 26 passes for 240 yards and three touchdowns in the first half. Richt cited problems with both coverage and pass rush.
Georgia (1-1) will host Troy, a member of the Sun Belt Conference, at noon Saturday. Troy is 0-3 after losses to UAB, Duke and Abilene Christian. Georgia begins a stretch of seven SEC games Sept. 27 against Tennessee in Athens.
The past two times Georgia reached the SEC Championship game — 2011 and 2012 — it did so despite losing to South Carolina. Still, the latest loss to the Gamecocks clearly took some luster off this Georgia team, at least for now.
“All you hear about all (last) week is, how great Georgia is,” South Carolina’s Thompson said after the game. “And I just got tired of it.”
