Mike White delivers message to Georgia players after two-loss week vs. SEC opponents

The Georgia basketball team is coming off an absolutely brutal stretch, one that saw the team face five straight ranked opponents to start SEC play.

The team lost three of those contests, including the last two against No. 6 Tennessee and No. 1 Auburn.

And while the game against Tennessee wasn’t particularly close, the Auburn game came down to the wire in a 70-68 loss. Something to build on, perhaps?

“We’re going to rest tomorrow and get better on Monday. That’s it,” coach Mike White said after the loss. “Our guys understand that there’s some areas that we can improve, of course. Auburn’s got a bunch of winning experience. They do. And we hope to be a team that’s saying that over time. Who knows when that is? But that’s the hope.”

All four of Georgia’s losses this season were to ranked opponents. In addition to the two games last week, the Bulldogs lost to No. 24 Ole Miss and No. 15 Marquette earlier in the season.

There have been enough glimpses that Georgia knows it can operate at a high level. That was evident in back-to-back wins at home over No. 6 Kentucky and No. 17 Oklahoma.

Now the challenge is finding some consistency.

“Hope this team can reach their ceiling. There were a few things that we could have done better, of course. But when you’re playing the best, some of the best teams in the country, your warts are exposed a little bit,” White said. “It’s a little bit easier for learning situations to resonate with our guys. So we’ll look forward to trying to consolidate as quickly as we can to watch on Monday and discuss it. We discussed a little bit some of the things we’ve done better, which I’ve already talked about here in the locker room before a day off.”

Life in the SEC isn’t going to get any easier, so the sooner Georgia starts to mature and handle both success and defeat a little better, the better off it’ll be.

Ranked games against top-five Florida and Alabama squads loom in the next two weeks. Georgia knows it has to erase the sting of last week’s defeats fast.

“As we’ve talked about too with this league, especially in this day and time, we’ve got to move on to the next one pretty quickly,” White said.