Georgia beat Western Kentucky 70-20 on Saturday, and if you only look at the number on the right side of that score, you'd think the Bulldogs just made a statement. I'm not so sure they did. Neither, it turns out, is Kirby Smart.
Start with what actually happened, because it was ridiculous. Gunner Stockton tied a Georgia school record with five touchdown passes, going 13 of 16 for 234 yards. Georgia built a 49-0 lead in the second quarter, tying the program record for points in a half. According to Georgia's own postgame notes, this was the first time since 1915 the Bulldogs scored at least 60 points in back-to-back games, and the 70 points were the most Georgia has hung on anyone since 1994. Nine different players scored. This wasn't garbage-time padding. It was domination from the opening kickoff, when a forced fumble set up a touchdown 61 seconds into the game.
None of that should convince you Georgia is the best team in the country yet, and Smart himself seems to agree, which is the most refreshing part of this whole thing.
Asked about the back-to-back blowouts, Smart didn't do the usual coach-speak about building confidence. He questioned it. "It's fun when you score on every possession but is it real?" he said. "Do you think we're going to do that in SEC play? ... It's all rosy and dandy until you've got to go on the road and you have to play somebody of SEC caliber." That's a coach who watched his team blow past a 40.5-point favorite spread and score 90 combined points against a 55.5 over/under and still isn't ready to call it meaningful. When your own coach is the loudest skeptic of your dominant win, listen to him before you crown anybody.
Still, I'll push back a little on the doom-and-gloom reading. If there's a real signal buried in this blowout, it's the depth, not the final score. True freshman Tyriq Green scored two different ways, a kickoff return touchdown and a fumble recovery touchdown, and getting nine different scorers isn't the kind of thing that happens by accident against overmatched competition alone. A team thin at the top of the roster wouldn't spread touchdowns around like that. That part's real, even if the opponent wasn't.
But Western Kentucky, now 0-2, didn't tell us anything about Georgia's SEC ceiling. WKU coach Tyson Helton put it plainly afterward: "Looking for positives coming out of this game, one thing our young men did was they kept competing... Obviously, it was not good a lot of times." That's an honest coach describing an overmatched team, not a program that pushed a top-two squad to answer hard questions.
The real answer to whether Georgia is actually elite comes next, on the road in SEC play. Smart flagged it himself. Beating up on two overmatched nonconference opponents at home is one thing. Winning ugly, or even losing close, on the road against real competition is the actual test. Until Georgia does that, I'm filing this 70-20 win where Smart seems to be filing it: impressive on paper, unresolved in reality.
