Kirby Smart’s Dawgs Make Playoff Statement. Will the committee listen?

The biggest part of the new college football world we find ourselves in was on full display Saturday night in Athens.

SEC heavyweights Tennessee and Georgia played each other for 60 solid minutes inside the flashing madhouse that was Sanford Stadium.

Lots of drama and lots of great plays on both sides of the football were made by a bunch of NFL-ready talent.

Millions of sets of eyeballs were fixed across the country on the case, and every piece felt like the ramifications were off the charts.

Despite all this, by the end of the evening, after the madhouse emptied into the cool Georgia gloaming, very little had actually been decided.

Welcome to the new world.

The scoreboard read as follows: no. 12 Georgia 31, no. 7 Tennessee 17. But with a dozen College Football Playoff spots up for grabs — not to mention berths in the Southeastern Conference championship game — neither the Bulldogs nor the Volunteers locked anything up for themselves … other than a chance to play another week of meaningful football.

That’s because both Georgia and Tennessee now have 2 losses. And from the little bit we’ve actually been able to determine, amid the histrionic talking heads and the hilarious insurance company-sponsored “Playoff Predictor” nonsense, both teams are still theoretically eligible for both the SEC crown and a spot to play for the big enchilada.

Don’t get it too twisted. Saturday was a huge statement win for Georgia, proving that coach Kirby Smart absorbed another trait from mentor Nick Saban: He simply doesn’t lose after losing. Instead, the Dawgs stood up, laced up their studded boots and broke some Tennessee noses to the delight of the home faithful.

Georgia had the most to give away coming into Saturday night having already lost to Alabama and Ole Miss in what has already been a crazy SEC season. That meant the Dawgs had zero room to stumble again despite a third game in the conference against a top-10 team.

Tennessee, meanwhile, was ahead thanks to just 1 loss in Athens — a 19-14 setback to Arkansas on Oct. 6 — and boasted a cigar-chomping win against the Crimson Tide that Georgia couldn’t pull off.

But now? Good luck trying to figure out where Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama or anywhere near anyone outside of Oregon (which almost lost to Wisconsin but remained undefeated) will finish in this week’s playoff rankings.

Not that Saturday was completely unproductive. Aside from Georgia apparently increasing its fireworks budget to keep up with their corn-from-a-jar revelers from the north, the Dawgs’ victory was a referendum on the quarterbacking talent of Carson Beck.

Considered a Heisman candidate early on and still a first-round prospect in the NFL Draft, Beck started to get a little confused during Georgia’s meandering up and down in the national polls. On Saturday, though, Beck was very strong – going 25-of-40 for 347 yards, throwing 2 TD passes to small-target tight end Oscar Delp and rushing for another score.

Not that his Volunteers counterpart, redshirt freshman Nico Iamaleava, was a slouch by any means. Just a week after experiencing what Tennessee called “concussion-like symptoms” against Mississippi State, Iamaleava wasn’t even easy to play against Georgia until Saturday — but he answered the bell with 167 passing yards and not a ton of mistakes.

Smart, a coach who hadn’t lost an SEC regular-season game in 42 outings before Alabama turned back the Dawgs 41-34, also faced only a bit of an existential crisis against Tennessee. Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss Rebels further exposed Georgia’s weaknesses just the week before in Oxford — making any decision Smart contemplated Saturday night fraught with consequence.

A single wrong move by Georgia would mean irrelevance for the rest of 2024, and likely another batch of opt-outs similar to what the Bulldogs saw in the wake of missing the 4-team Playoff race last season.

Despite operating without a safety net, Smart and the Dawgs pushed all the right buttons to win their 8th straight against Tennessee and improve to 8-1 against the Vols with Smart patrolling between the hedges. It certainly helped that Athens After Dark was electric, a nonstop noise that tested Tennessee’s eardrums and forced offensive linemen to move early a few times in key situations.

Georgia’s coup d’état on Saturday eventually came, just as Smart had hoped all week by believing the tougher team in the 4th quarter would win. First, the Dawgs’ defense forced Tennessee to score behind 24-17 with 8:47 left. Beck and Georgia took over in its own 8 spot and calmly marched 92 outside yards over an equally subdued 6:21 — icing it with a Nate Frazier 2-yard touchdown plunge.

It gave Georgia its 29th straight home win, a win that saw Tennessee record just 8 first downs and go scoreless in the final 30 minutes.

In the final analysis, unfortunately, Saturday night wasn’t so dissimilar to Friday night’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight: a truckload of pomp and circumstance, a clear winner and a clear loser, but still questions about what was accomplished .

Both Georgia and Tennessee are still fighting for 1 of the 12 Playoff Golden Tickets with 2 games left in the regular season – with Georgia’s resume seemingly better on every scorecard. That said, a world-class statistician armed with algorithms and fancy charts still can’t possibly predict what will happen — not for the Bulldogs, Volunteers or the 40 or so other teams that could argue for a Playoff spot.

Welcome to the new world.