Thompson: Georgia Has A Chance To Miss The College Football Playoff

Hey Cole, how are you? JR, I am so glad to be on with you tonight.

I'm so glad that Hickey was able to reach out to me. We got a lot to break down when it comes to the college football playoff. There are elimination games this weekend. And more importantly, there is now a question of what is the best job left on the market with Billy Napier going to be back in 2024?

Well, let me ask you this and we'll get into the college football playoff. Knowing that Billy Napier is going to be sticking around, what are your initial thoughts? Is it strictly because of the buyout?

Is it NIL? Is it players sticking around? Why is he sticking around?

I think it's a lot of things, JR, for being honest. The first one is naturally the buyout. It's $26 million if they were to let him go after this year. The point of the matter is that that revenue money could easily go towards NIL, towards the recruiting aspects, towards the transfer portal funds to allow players that are maybe a few pieces away from joining this roster and being able to build off of this upcoming season. The other point that I think a lot of analysts are kind of forgetting about at this moment is the schedule doesn't change next year at all. It is the exact same schedule. The only difference is, well, instead of going to Starkville and playing Mississippi State, Mississippi State is coming to you.

Instead of having Texas A&M come to the swamp, you're going to Aggieland. So the expectations for a new coach to come on in is to be a much more stable, stoic version than what you saw with Billy Napier. But you're also going to have a roster turnaround because whenever a coach leaves, they bring in their own players and players that were committed to the previous staff, they want to go elsewhere.

So it's going to be the same results. If you keep Billy and results don't speak volume, then ipso facto congratulations, you can move off of him with just cause. The third point is, was there a coach available to be able to kind of build off of what Billy is currently doing? Now, you and I both can agree that after the first two games, they start off one and two with losses to Texas A&M and Miami where they looked awful. The writing was on the wall.

He was probably going to be shown the door. But now we are seeing a version of Florida that has kind of rejolted since winning the Mississippi State. And I'm not saying that you take participation trophies and call a close loss to Georgia a good moral victory. But if you don't have somebody signed on the dotted line that can come on in and have the same type of atmosphere for that player locker room, then it really doesn't matter the results when you know that everything else is still going to be a year away from transitioning. The final thing is that, JR, they don't have a president right now. They're in an interim president situation to where Scott Strickland really would be making a call to, if the new president comes in and doesn't like the vibes of the current coach, not only is Strickland shown the door, but they're already paying one buyout to pay for another buyout just to be able to bring in somebody that the president feels comfortable with.

The timing just fell off. The team is sitting at four and four. The announcement I thought was very risky because depending on what the season looks like down the stretch, they're going to have to play a certain brand of football. But Billy may feel like the guy if he gets the right pieces in. But the organization at this point has to say, we are all in. Because you see people in the SEC think out their chest and boast about, we can afford whoever we want.

We can do this our certain way. And then when the push comes to shove and you say, all right, prove it, they take a couple zeros off of that checkbook and go, here you go, use this money to go bring in the right players. Well, you don't get told no a lot at Georgia.

You don't get told no a lot at Alabama or Texas or LSU. And you're trying to get back to that level of being in that conversation. So boosters and NIL collectives have to realize if you're going all in with Billy, you're also got to go all in on the actual process of NIL collectives. Bring in the right players, bring in the right recruits, continue to build the foreground and hopefully things turn the corner. But Billy is certainly on thin ice going into 2025.

Nicole Thompson is joining us here from SEC unfiltered. You named some of the other the big dogs. Well, specifically the the Bulldogs. And we saw that they they're not necessarily, you know, kind of just going through the season skating on by Florida had a lead against them. And Carson Beck is throwing the ball, everybody except for his teammates.

And so we see them. They're going to take on Ole Miss. People looking at Lane Kiffin and going, here we go again, the guy who can never kind of get over the hump. What are your thoughts on both the Bulldogs and Ole Miss?

We know kind of going in two different directions here. So for Ole Miss, this is an elimination game, which makes them, for my money, the most dangerous two loss team in the country. Because if they don't win, it doesn't matter what they do against Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl or Florida in two weeks after the bye, their season's over.

And they have been planning this out for almost a full year. J.R., we remember what happened last year in Athens, Georgia, where it was 7-7 after the first quarter. And then Georgia said, OK, let's go to work. And the final score was 52 to 17. And Lane Kiffin went into the press room and said, we need to build our offensive and defensive lines. Our track has got to be better if we are going to win a conference championship. And so that was the point of emphasis throughout the offseason with NIL, with the transfer portal.

Walter Nolan, Ewen Manley-Ellen, Chris Paul from Arkansas. These are players that not only were proven at their former schools, they were players proven at schools that already played against Georgia while in the SEC. So they put an emphasis on making sure that this game had been circled on the calendar, they were in a competitive nature. On the opposing sideline, Kirby Smart even said this past week, this may be our toughest test and it's a major testament to what Ole Miss has done because they feel like the most balanced team in the SEC. And the numbers back that up. They're number one in scoring, they're top five in passing, they're top three in rushing, they're great on third down. And defensively, they win in two major areas. They're number two in the country in run defense, which is usually a bread and butter for Georgia on the ground game. And they're number six in red zone efficiency. They do not allow a lot of teams to score from within side to 20. And if they do, it's usually a field goal. And this is a game that can easily be turned over. People are looking at the roster and saying, well, how can we trust that we're going to see anything different overnight?

Because Ole Miss spent over $6 million in NIL collective to go out and add in the right players. If there was ever a breakout game that needed to occur for Carson Beck, this is the one. If you look back at his first 17 games, he had 31 touchdowns against five interceptions. His last five games, 10 touchdowns, 11 interceptions. This is one of those games where you need Carson Beck to wake on up.

I'm not sure he can do so. This has been a game that I think Lane Kiffin has been preparing himself for. I actually like Ole Miss in this matchup.

I'm expecting the conversation for the college football playoff. We haven't seen a good rushing attack from Georgia, and the passing attack is too inconsistent. The one area you can beat Ole Miss is through the air. I don't think Carson Beck does it.

Oh, wow. Cole Thompson here from SEC unfiltered. Well, obviously a win here would give Lane Kiffin a little bit of grace because we know he typically – he can't win the big one.

No, he definitely can. I think it also – it does wonders for the conversation of putting them in the college football playoff hunt. Because right now they have two losses by a total of six points, including one in overtime on the road in Death Valley. Against an LSU squad that still is in the hunt for an SEC title and a conference championship at a playoff berth. So with a win against the number two team in the country, or number three team in the college football playoff rankings, that would justify everything that we need to see about Ole Miss. They would win with style points. They would win with flair.

They would win with the stats. They have a quarterback in a category five Jackson Dartnado, as I like to call him, going on to the conversation about making it to the Big Apple for the Heisman Trophy as a dark horse. There's a reason to believe that with a win on Saturday in front of the home crowd, Lane Kiffin has not only secured himself another pay raise from Keith Carter and the athletic staff, he's put Ole Miss in a great position to at least make the college football playoff. Well, Cole, you mentioned LSU. That's another big matchup we have. We know Alabama is going through its own transition now that Nick Saban is sitting around on TV. Kalyn DeBoer is running the show. And it feels that LSU, things have been pretty quiet for Brian Kelly.

I mean, he's not banging water bottles on tables. It seems things have been pretty quiet. What do you expect for these two teams out of battling out of four spot in the playoff? Well, as Les Miles once said, it's Death Valley, a place where dreams truly come to die. The only exception to the rule has been Alabama. They have won every single night game in Death Valley under Nick Saban until last year in 2022.

Two years ago in 2022. Spoiler alert, it is a more Nick Saban. It's the Kalyn DeBoer era.

So do things change in that vicinity? Do things end up voting well in favor of Brian Kelly? And this really is a playoff elimination game. You're not getting in at 9-3 unless you have a bunch of other chaos occur throughout the Big 10, throughout the ACC, throughout the Big 12. And even then, it would be very challenging for a team like LSU because of the head-to-head loss for Texas A&M. This isn't going to still be, I think for my money, the old version of this matchup. Physicality in the trenches and who can fight for the last yard.

That is what is going to make this game. Both of these teams have been stagnant at times when it comes to allowing teams to rush against them. Alabama's averaging around 130 yards allowed on the ground. But right now, they don't really feel like LSU can run the football, which is kind of shocking, JR, when you look at them having one of the best offensive lines, headlined by Will Campbell and Emmert Jones, and them having Callan out running back, Kaden Durham showed you in that Arkansas game, he can be an enforcer and a bell cow workhorse when given the opportunity.

But on the flip side, you have the same thing with Alabama. Jalen Milro talked to some people out in the Alabama country last week. They basically said he was playing on his last leg, crawling toward the bye week, going up against Mizzou.

Nobody in college football needed a break more than Jalen Milro. They have the passing attack, but they have a good ground game in Justice Haynes and Jam Miller. Can Nick Sheridan dial up schemes that allow them to live in third and short to open up the playbook by putting an emphasis on the ground game? Can they win between the trenches?

Can they get up to the second level of the defense? Can they force LSU to have to make some adjustments? Because if so, Alabama still feels like it's Alabama. But we were told we have to judge Brian Kelly in year three. He mentioned that when he left South Bend, came down to Baton Rouge, decided to embrace his inner foghorn, Leghorn, and made it clear that we judge him in year three.

We're going to judge him, and we're going to ponder, is he the right guy for the job? Because even though it is a new era of Alabama football, I think Jalen Milro wants to guarantee him in the college football playoff one more time. I got Alabama winning this one by a touchdown. Okay. Cole Thompson here with us from SEC Unfiltered.

Final question for you. You mentioned some of the warts, typically the warts that the quarterback has, for the Georgia Bulldogs. Do you not see them as potentially being in the championship game? Is Carson Beck going to hold them back?

You know, it's a possibility, JR. What's really shocking, and don't say this too loud, because there's going to be people out there that come for me in the comments section, there's a shot that Georgia misses the playoff altogether. They still have another game ahead against Tennessee, and the one thing about Tennessee this year is, even though Nico Iamaliaba has not lived up to his Heisman hype, Dylan Sampson has. He is the best running back in the SEC far and away. He's averaging 6.7 yards per play, and Tim Banks, the defensive coordinator, needs to be a front runner for not just the Broyles award, but also any G5 job that is made available this offseason.

They are playing ferocious. They're doing a great job eliminating explosive plays by wide receivers, and this will be another game where they're going to have to trust Carson Beck to have to win through the air. They have got to at least walk away with a victory either against the volunteers at home or on the road against Ole Miss to guarantee a 10-2 season, let alone making it to the SEC championship game. Sometimes it's okay to actually miss the championship, though. I think a Georgia team that feels like it's confident and can find a way to host a playoff game at the 8th seed or the 9th seed, it might end up being beneficial rather than getting an injury occurring in Atlanta, and then they get the first round by or they get the 5th seed, and then we talk about them potentially losing to a Boise State at home because of inconsistencies.

I think that honestly they would much rather maybe miss that chance as long as they're guaranteed in the dozen dance. Damn, Cole Thompson coming through with the nightmare fuel for all my folks here in Georgia. Man, we'll see what happens. I'm confident.

I don't like Carson back by. I got a little bit more confidence in him than you do, Cole. I'm trying.

I'm trying. I believe that they're going to the playoffs. Don't take that at all. They're going to find a way to make it. I still believe it's a pathway through the SEC championship as it happens in Georgia because you've got the coach and you've got the personnel. Well, good deal.

Well, listen, I agree with you there. They'll go all the way to disappoint. That's the Bulldog way.

We'll see what happens. Hey, Cole, where can people follow you and all of your work with SEC Unfiltered? Yeah, if you want to check me out, it's at Mr. Cole Thompson on Twitter. We do live instant reaction shows after every major game on Saturdays. We do a live postgame show on Mondays. We do live reactions to the SEC and college football playoff rankings. So go follow us on YouTube at SEC Unfiltered.

Follow us at SEC Unfiltered on social media. And you can check out all of my great work found at Mr. Cole Thompson on my own YouTube channel at Mr. Cole Thompson. Well, thank you again for the time. Let's see what these games look like over the weekend. We'll catch you down the line. Can't wait to talk to you again, JR. Take care.