Photo by Larry Wynn. (www.LarryWynn.com)
I know we're all feeling pretty good in Athens, since the Dawgs are coming off of a National Championship Game appearance and the team seems to be as talented as ever, but that doesn't mean the 2018 season will be easy sailing.
For a potential return to the biggest stage in college football, Georgia will need to avoid several huge obstacles.
So what stumbling blocks could possibly derail our season this time around?
Let's count'em down!
First, we can't avoid the spectre of the ever-looming "big scandal." Just look at Ole Miss, Ohio State, and Arkansas (several years ago). Do you think any of them expected to wake up one morning and find out that their coach had been embroiled in a cheating/abuse/motorcycle scandal?
Oberfell was a lie. Fromm is Blofeld!
I'm not saying "Where there's smoke there's fire." I don't see smoke around UGA. (Hey, Rylan. I see smoke. You hungry?) I'm just saying that it's technically possible. We could find out tomorrow that Jake Fromm is secretly the head of SPECTRE and has been using his time as a Division I quarterback to recruit secret agents into his employ.
That...uh...that would probably put a damper on things, wouldn't it?
Next, there's always the fear of injury. One of the best things that worked out for Georgia in 2017 was injury luck, much like with the Falcons in 2016 (but enough about that). The players who needed to get hurt did and the ones who didn't stayed healthy. It was pretty uncanny how that happened.
When Jacob Eason went down in the third offensive series of the season, we were all worried that it spelled doom for the season. Then it turned out that Eason's injury was the best thing that could've happened.
Not only did Jake Fromm turn out to be a more polished leader than anyone could have predicted, I personally believe that him getting extra experience in the App State game helped him tremendously going into Notre Dame. Obviously there is no comparison between the two programs, although both have won in the Big House, but throwing Fromm into the fire at South Bend might've been ill-advised without getting some college playing time in the season opener to get his feet wet.
Other than that, the Dawgs were able to avoid any tragic injuries all season long. That just doesn't happen in football. Especially when you consider Georgia's history with injuries in the last few years, that fact alone is astounding. Nobody needs to see Nick Chubb's infamous Knoxville stretch replayed over and over again.
Don't worry, I've already knocked on wood before I type this. There's no way that Georgia maintains the same kind of luck with injuries this season. I just can't see that happening.
The beauty of it is that, even if we do have a couple of season-ending injuries, the roster is fairly well insulated to the point that we could sustain a one-deep injury in several spots.
Even another QB going down might not be the death of this season. Justin Fields is waiting in the wings to see what he can do, and I'm sure he would relish the opportunity to do to Fromm what Fromm did to Eason.
We could lose our top three running backs (if you can even put them in order) and still have a two-headed tandem pretty similar to what we had with Chubb and Sony Michel.
Even on the offensive and defensive lines, the positions that seem most susceptible to bad injuries, we could sustain a few losses before things were dire.
That's the great thing about how well Kirby Smart is recruiting. The roster is full of five-star and four-star players deep enough that, if one starter goes down, you may actually have a more talented player behind them. That player may not have the experience, which is always a worry, but they have the talent and can be developed.
"But how could the rankings be wrong!?" (Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash
On a similar note, there's another thing we should consider about this talent-laden roster. What if all the recruit rankings are wrong?!
(Collective gasp)
Okay, so the 2018 roster has 61 players who were rated as a four-star or five-star prospect out of high school. What are the odds that all 61 of them, or even half of them, just aren't as good at playing football as they are at running drills and making game tape?
It is entirely possible that a few of them will flame out. It's also possible that there are a few 3-star players who will show up and do a lot more than expected.
Remember guys like Washaun Ealey and Caleb King? They were supposed to be "better than Knowshon!"
Spoiler. They weren't.
Remember Isaiah Crowell? He was supposed to be the next NFL-caliber back that the Dawgs could trot out on the field.
Spoiler. He...kinda was?
Crowell's problem was never talent. His problem was laziness and focus. As my grandfather would always say about Adam LaRoche, "I don't like him. He's just lazy."
It's actually pretty astounding that Crowell ran for more than 700 yards in 2011 despite barely playing.
So yes. You could run into the occasional recruit stud who just turns into a dud, and you could get a guy who has all the talent in the world who doesn't want to work, but again, this team has so much talent on it that you could probably overcome one or two busts.
I will admit, a lot of this "worry" I'm talking about is pretty tongue-in-cheek. Sure, these are things to be concerned about, but they likely won't have any real bearing on the season to come.
But the last thing I want to talk about is absolutely something I am worried about.
The 2017 Georgia football team over-performed in many regards. Sure, that was a talented team, but were they really that much better than everyone they played? I'm not so sure.
I think the best thing that team had going for it was leadership. When players like Roquan Smith, Chubb, and Michel are your team leaders, when three of the best players in college football are showing up every day and working hard and staying focused on the game, you have a rare gift that any coach in the country would trade for. And I'm not talking about their on-field production.
One of the high school coaches I used to cover, Coach Heath Webb who is now at Deshaun Watson's alma mater in Gainesville, always said, "Coach-led teams can be pretty good, but player-led teams can be great." When your athletes are the true leaders, and they're leading the right way, that's when a team is going to be special.
I miss him already. (Photo by Larry Wynn)
I don't know if anyone on the 2018 roster is really in a position to lead the way that Michel and Chubb especially led the team last year. I just don't know.
My hope is that somebody saw how those guys did it and picked up on that. My hope is that the 2017 juniors and sophomores saw the leadership that Michel and Chubb displayed and are willing to take the reins this year.
I'm very excited about Fromm as a leader, of course. Everything you've heard about Fromm is that he is ready to lead the team and to be that guy. The problem with that is that he's a sophomore.
That's not to say that a sophomore can't lead. And I think most of the team respects Fromm as a leader. But the ideal position is for a senior or a junior to be that leader. You want one of those guys to really run the show just because, as an upperclassmen, the other upperclassmen are more liable to look up to them.
Of all the "realistic" worry-inducing scenarios facing Georgia football this season, the leadership vacuum is the one that I am most concerned about. Honestly, it's the only one that I'm genuinely concerned about.
Don't get me wrong. I spend a fair amount of time worrying that Elijah Holyfield's incredible biceps will gain sentience and massacre the rest of the locker room, you should too, but I think they're keeping him in check for now.
It’s 7 Porsches per day and a McLaren for breakfast on Saturday, by the way.
As long as we can avoid any dark cabalistic rituals or investigations into how many Porsches D'Andre Swift has to eat to maintain his speed, I fully expect the 2018 Georgia football season to be pretty good.
And if the leadership vacuum can be filled by the right players, then I expect the 2018 Georgia football season to be just as memorable, if not more so, as the one we just lived through in 2017.