ATHENS, Ga. — The one thing you used to be able to bank on in the SEC, the one truism in a league that passed the national championship baton around based on a reputation on just one side of the ball, was Georgia’s defense.
There were first-round NFL draft picks galore. They made timely plays from the first drive to the last. They carried the Bulldogs when their offense was stodgy and meandering.
No more. Not in 2025. Georgia’s defense is mortal—and some might even say mediocre, if we’re being truly honest.
The funny thing about this sea change, the thing that allows head coach Kirby Smart to walk around postgame far more relaxed than he was when he was first starting out with a headset at his alma mater, is that it might not matter one bit.
This is just college football nowadays after the transfer portal has dispersed talent around like a broken-up piñata.
Normally that would be cause for concern between the hedges, the kind that gets the red-and-black faithful concerned about their team’s prospects in the College Football Playoff.
These Bulldogs, however, seem unconcerned. They are not only accustomed to this kind of new normal, they may even be more dangerous a threat to win the national title than they were a year ago when they won the SEC.
That was born out on Saturday as No. 9 Georgia despite, not because of, its defense managed to knock No. 5 Mississippi from the ranks of the unbeaten in a 43–35 classic shootout at Sanford Stadium.
“Just another day in the SEC. One-possession games have become the norm,” said Smart, hardly the sweaty mess he used to be despite his defense giving up five consecutive touchdown drives to open the game for the first time ever. “I just told the guys, that’s a culture win because you don’t win that game if you’re not physically tough, mentally tough. We call it, hard to kill. And the one thing we are, we’re hard to kill.”
Hard to put away and increasingly confident in living in such margins, even if it means readjusting expectations for a program that was previously accustomed to getting a stop every time the third-down bell tolled. Those days are clearly over, no matter how much NFL talent may still be on the sideline.
Against the Rebels, the home team didn’t force a punt until there was 12:44 left in the game—snapping a run of 11 consecutive scoring drives to open the game between the pair of Top 10 teams. The Bulldogs didn’t even have a stop on third down until the third quarter and were pushed around and opened up like they used to do to overmatched opponents.
Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss looked nothing like a former Division II player under center against a slew of five-stars, but closer to the type of signal-caller who could earn an invitation to New York for the Heisman Trophy ceremony. He zipped passes out quickly to go 19 of 36 for 263 yards and a touchdown through the air while also leading his team in rushing (44 yards). After an initial pair of scoring drives each covering 65 yards in the first quarter, Chambliss was responsible for 90% of the team’s offense and seemingly growing stronger with every snap.
Luckily for Georgia, it had tight end Lawson Luckie on its side and a high-powered offense to lean on that ripped through the Ole Miss defense.
Luckie, a 6' 4" junior, looked like Brock Bowers incarnate at times the way he was able to find open space. He had only five catches for 43 yards but three were in the middle of the end zone.
It also helped that quarterback Gunner Stockton had perhaps his best overall game as a starter, hitting 26-of-31 passes for 289 yards. Factor in his scrambling (59 yards, one score) and he finished with as many incompletions (five) as total touchdowns while completing every single one of his 13 passes during the second half.
“There’s zero panic. We’ve been down multiple games this season and been able to come back and fight,” said wideout Zachariah Branch after a game-high eight catches for 71 yards. “This team never lacks resiliency.”
Nor the ability to score on every single one of its drives in the back-and-forth affair, which added three key Peyton Woodring field goals to keep pace until its defense was finally able to muster up a stop late.
The group, which looked ragged in allowing 155 yards in the third quarter across just two drives, seemed to somehow find a way to flip a switch just when it needed it most. Georgia got three consecutive stops to end the game and ended up allowing just 13 yards in the fourth quarter.

“It was a goddam breath of fresh air. That was one of the biggest drives of the game,” said defensive tackle Jordan Hall of the initial one of those stops. “I can’t really ask for more out of us, except that we could have got it done earlier.”
He’s not alone, but both Hall and fans better get used to timely stops taking priority over the usual volume the program hung its hat on in recent years.
“We just had so many leads in the fourth quarter, we’ve been better than everybody else that we had this distance and this margin that the game didn’t come down to one little thing. [Now] our margins are smaller, the margins are tight everywhere,” Smart said. “The SEC is becoming, I’m not talking about the NFL in terms of talent, but about where the games go [down to the wire], the clock management.”
Though Smart was speaking specifically about his own conference, this weekend underscored that such thin margins span the entire sport on a weekend where three Top 10 teams went down and the list of undefeated teams shrank from 11 to five.
Ole Miss can count themselves in that latter category, unable to find a winning play down the stretch.
Georgia, despite some glaring woes on the side of the ball that used to be its calling card, wound up doing the opposite. Even when you can’t count on the Bulldogs to play consistently good defense, they may be just good enough in the margins to ensure that doesn’t matter at all in the end.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why Georgia Football Still Looks Like a Title Threat Even Without Its Usual Stout Defense.