TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Julian Humphrey walked slowly off the field, a towel across the back of his head. A team trainer tried to console him, to no avail. Georgia had just lost, and Humphrey, who had given up the winning touchdown, was clearly feeling the weight of it as he walked slowly towards the tunnel.
Where Kirby Smart awaited him. Georgia’s head coach, known more for yelling and screaming and fitting record numbers of curse words into single sentences, pulled Humphrey towards him. He patted him on the head. Whatever was said, it did not involve cursing.
It wasn’t just Humphrey. Smart waited at the tunnel and thanked as many of his players as he could.
“There’s no greater response of a leader than to be with the guys who go into battle with you,” Smart said later. “And those guys battled tonight.”
Georgia lost to Alabama yet again, and as usual, it found a new and painful way to do it: outright embarrassment for a half, then rallying for what would have been the biggest comeback in program history, only to have Alabama still pull it out, 41-34.
How to feel about this loss? Conflicted. The comeback was inspiring, a testament to this team’s character. The fact Georgia had to come back from 28-0 could also be the takeaway, especially after slow starts in its other two power-conference games.
That this loss happened against a coach not named Nick Saban will also be seen as an indication that Alabama is the problem. Smart is 97-17 as Georgia’s coach but 1-6 against Alabama, where he was an assistant before coming back to his alma mater. What does that record indicate, Smart was asked Saturday night?
“I don’t know, what’s everybody else’s record against them?” Smart said, smiling. “Anybody got one better than 1-6, that’s played them six times. I don’t think so.”
Actually, Hugh Freeze, who brings his struggling Auburn team to Georgia next Saturday, is 2-4 against Alabama between his time at Ole Miss and Auburn. Gus Malzahn went 3-5 against Alabama as Auburn’s coach.
But to be fair, Freeze and Malzahn got Alabama on their home fields every other year. Smart has to wait until next year for his first shot against the Crimson Tide in Athens. He’s lost to them twice here and four times at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in either the SEC or national championship.
Which brings us to the other reason to feel conflicted: the timing of this loss. It does not end the Bulldogs’ season. It does mean less margin for error for Georgia to make the College Football Playoff, and it may mean having to get two wins out of the other three top-10 matchups on the schedule: Texas in three weeks, Ole Miss and Tennessee in November. (Although Ole Miss will surely fall out of the top 10 after its stunning home loss to Kentucky.)
The question now becomes what this loss means about Georgia. Did it merely lose a one-possession road game to another elite team? No shame in that. Or was the first half the most telling sequence, not to mention the inability to make plays in the final few minutes to close out the epic comeback?
Things that were assumed about Georgia when it was the preseason No. 1 are no longer assumed, starting with the quarterback. Carson Beck was at his best and his worst on Saturday night. He set career highs for passing yards (439) and turnovers (four, including three interceptions, after never throwing more than one in a game).
“That first half, we probably played terrible,” Beck said. “I don’t think we have to watch the film to see that. We weren’t our best, and that starts with me, I’ve got to be better. But I’m happy about the way we fought. We brought it all the way back to the end, we just weren’t able to close it out.”
Beck needs to bottle up whatever he was doing in the fourth quarter, when he looked confident and threw the ball with zip. For most of the rest of the game, he was tentative and did not see the field well, some of the same problems from the Kentucky game and early against Clemson.
What’s wrong with Beck? The easy explanation is he misses Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey, but that forgets this year’s Clemson game, when against a pretty good defense he threw for 278 yards and two touchdowns. Or even the games last year when he didn’t have Bowers and McConkey, who missed four and five games, respectively.
For all the talk the last couple weeks about whether Georgia has enough playmakers, receivers were getting open on Saturday night. Arian Smith, Dillon Bell, Dominic Lovett … they can make plays. Their quarterback just needs to play like he did last year.
Then there’s the Georgia defense. On the good side, it recovered well to play shutdown defense for most of the second half — until the very end. On the bad side, well, four touchdowns on Alabama’s first four drives. Jalen Milroe and Ryan Williams looked like the two best players in college football, and who knows, they may be. Georgia is supposed to be full of future pros, but at the start of Saturday’s game it looked overmatched, unlike a typical Smart defense.
“Obviously we were not really prepared, and that falls on me, in the first half,” Smart said. “We didn’t do a great job, especially defensively.”
That was the macro view. The micro view: Georgia’s original strategy of blitzing Milroe backfired as he rushed for 104 yards and completed his first 11 passes. When Georgia backed off, it had more success.
“We were aggressive in the first half, took some chances,” Smart said. “In the second half, we played some tighter coverage. We made some stops. We possessed the ball on offense. When you make stops, you give yourself a chance.”
And the Bulldogs had more than a chance. They had the lead, ever so briefly, before Milroe hit Williams, who then scampered past Humphrey and down the field, into the end zone. Humphrey was immediately down on himself, with safety Malaki Starks telling Humphrey to keep his head up and get ready for the next play.
On that next play, Starks was beat for the two-point conversion. That kind of night for the Bulldogs.
Beck and the offense nearly had one more comeback in them, driving down to the Alabama 20, and Beck heaved a ball to Colbie Young in the end zone, one-on-one, the play they wanted. But it was picked off. Game over.
The long-term meaning of it: To be determined.
“I don’t believe in moral victories. A loss is a loss. But we have a lot to learn from,” linebacker Jalon Walker said. “I’m still very proud of this team, how we competed and fought.”
“I didn’t learn anything tonight that I didn’t already know,” Smart said. “Make no mistake about it. That group we’ve got in there, man, they’re connected, they’ve got pride. I told them: I don’t know what this second half is going to look like, but when we watch it we’re going to find out a lot about ourselves. We’re going to see what kind of character we have.”
Character counts. But it’s not everything.
The Georgia of the second half, much like the Georgia of the second half against Clemson and the Georgia that held off Kentucky, that Georgia can still win the national championship.
The question is when we will see that team for an entire game. Maybe Georgia found something here that, even in a loss, will propel it to greatness. Or maybe when a team shows you who it is, you need to believe it.
(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
