ATLANTA — In a bar on the Beltline as Texas A&M’s hopes of reaching the SEC Championship Game imploded, two Georgia fans debated overlapping December dilemmas: Do we really want to play for the conference title? Would we rather take the first-round bye in the College Football Playoff, or just play through?
The argument was fueled partly by libations celebrating an eighth straight win in Clean Old Fashioned Hate — a grind-it-out 16-9 victory against Georgia Tech. But it speaks to a real tension in late November as teams try to decide where rest ends and rust begins heading into the postseason.
Georgia sits at No. 4 for now — and will certainly move up on Tuesday — but the looming questions remain. What would have happened to that ranking if Texas A&M had made the SEC title game instead? And what happens if Georgia plays in the game and loses, particularly to Alabama for a second time this season? Kirby Smart, however, sees it differently. There’s still something tangible on the line next week, and that’s all that matters.
“If you worry about injury risk, we won’t practice next week,” Smart said. “You live your life scared of injuries, you know what? You get a very scared team. There’s also an opportunity to win the SEC championship. Does that matter? Does anybody care about that anymore? I mean, I grew up thinking that was the greatest game in the world, and I just differ from everybody else, yeah, we lost guys today to injury. We’re gonna lose guys in practice to injury, but that’s next man up. Like, that’s wrong with this whole thing now? It’s like, well, what if you get hurt? What if you do this? I mean, it’s football. It’s all part of it.”
College football’s December calendar creates plenty of friction, and depending on who you ask, conference championships are part of the issue. Sorting out who actually qualifies often requires official statements and dizzying tiebreaker scenarios. With leagues continuing to expand and evolve, conference title games seem destined for eventual reimagining. Play-in weekends to an expanded playoff could be the future, though commissioners punted that conversation to January. For now, the banners still matter — even if a bigger prize waits down the road.
When four Georgia players were asked whether they’d prefer to sit out rather than play for a conference title, quarterback Gunner Stockton answered for the group.
“We’ll just be ready to play whenever we are.”
Each of the four teams that earned a bye in last year’s CFP lost in its — a small sample size that has fueled fan anxiety about the free pass this season. Georgia and Oregon were slight underdogs, while Boise State and Arizona State faced double-digit spreads.
The Dawgs and Ducks fell to teams that sat at home during conference championship weekend (and ultimately met for the national title), while the Broncos and Sun Devils lost for more conventional reasons. Did Georgia and Oregon lose because of the rest, or simply because the opponent was better? The complexion of the top four seeds feels even murkier this year. Last season, they went to the four highest-ranked conference champions; this season, they go to the top four teams overall. Smart declined to engage in that debate.
“Not for me to decide, y’all know me well enough,” Smart said. “I’m not in here lobbying those folks that make that decision, or they’re sitting in a committee room they make those decisions. Our job is to respond to it.”
Smart said Georgia has mapped out plans for either scenario next week. The staff will juggle signing-day prep, self-scouting work and guidance gathered from programs that dealt with a week off last season. While Georgia will take a structured approach to balancing rest and rust, Smart understands that results — not planning — ultimately validate decisions.
“The sweet spot is win,” Smart said. “People question what the decision was right. There is no right decision. I mean, we talked to coaches all over the place last year that dealt with it. And there was the extended, long way off. There was the not-extended long lay off. There was the Ohio State got hot and they didn’t plan a championship game. Look at the end of the day, you got to do what you feel best about and you’ll always second-guess it if you lose, and you always won’t if you win. So I don’t know what that sweet spot is. I know talking to people that I trust and have been through it helps get the information.”
Georgia will play for the SEC Championship next week, like it or not. The Beltline debate is simply a symptom of FBS college football’s current crossroads — a postseason stitched together by overlapping solutions that other levels of the sport perfected long ago, yet still hasn’t quite landed here.
The fact that this is even a debate among Georgia fans is a blueblood problem, but with the SEC and Big Ten controlling the Playoff’s future, the sport’s one percent will continue shaping decisions that ripple across everyone else.