Kirby Smart's Georgia football program may have actually overachieved this last decade-plus.
While Kirby Smart has led his alma mater to back-to-back College Football Playoff National Championships, you can certainly argue that his Georgia football program has actually … overachieved?! Wait, what???
In Bill Connelly's latest deep dive for ESPN, he used SP+ as a metric to measure the most dominant college football programs of each decade dating back to the 1920s. After crunching the numbers, it still has Georgia as the third-best program in the country in the 2020s, trailing Alabama and Ohio State, as well as the fifth-best program in the nation during the decade prior.
Georgia may have had two of the three best teams in the last three years, but didn't have a top-five offense in this metric. However, its 2021 and 2022 defenses rank second and third in this exercise. Of course, this is only a three-year sample size with seven more years' worth of data to be added, but it is still so weird to not see the Dawgs sitting on top of the 2020s by themselves.
Let's discuss what these numbers truly mean, as well as what is really driving the bus in Athens.
Georgia is not the top Dawg in latest college football rankings; what gives, man?!
I could be wrong in this, but anytime I look at what SP+ tries to measure, I feel like it puts more of an emphasis on head-to-head matchups and things of that nature. While I do subscribe to the notion that it can be a fairly accurate indicator of if a team is going to win a game or not, I always end up going back to recruitment. You can only win a national title with at least one top-five class.
In short, you need one of two things to win it all in this day and age of college football. That would be either at least one top-five recruiting class nationally during a four-year cycle, or have a truly transcendent quarterback who can help overcome some glaring roster inefficiencies. Georgia does recruit at a top-five level, but the Dawgs have not had a Cam Newton or a Deshaun Watson either.
Stetson Bennett IV will one day have multiple statues in Athens, but even The Mailman was a former two-star recruit, a walk-on and a JUCO transfer. He became a college football legend for playing his best when the game required it against high-end competition. Of course, he did have blue-chippers all around him on offense, as well as one stud after another over on the defense.
Overall, I think what this three-year sample size shows is the change of guard in the SEC, and in college football, for that matter. Only recently has Georgia overtaken Alabama as the team to beat in college football. The same principle applies to Michigan only recently overtaking Ohio State as the best program in Big Ten country. Obviously, we're talking about four of the best five programs.
Ultimately, Georgia has a fantastic opportunity to climb up into the top spot of these rankings by the end of the decade. The Dawgs will probably win a third, maybe even a fourth or more, national title before we get to 2030. However, nothing gold can stay. There will be another program out there that will take college football's throne from Georgia at some point in the next few seasons.
The question is who will knock the Dawgs of their highest perch and when could it really happen?
