Mike Bobo, Georgia offense figuring out identity in fall camp

ATHENS, Ga. — Georgia’s offense is going to look a little bit different this year. Part of that can, and will, be attributed to the change in offensive coordinator and play caller from Todd Monken to Mike Bobo. There’s also the typical offseason attrition from a college roster that affects an offense on a year to year basis.

“Each year you try to figure out your identity as an offense. Whether I was sitting there at coordinator or Coach Monken came back, you have to figure out what pieces of the puzzle fit to what things that we did well last year and figure out what changed,” Bobo told reporters on Tuesday in his first meeting with them since coming back to Athens. “Darnell was such a big impact for us, not necessarily just blocking in-line but also being able to block on the perimeter, Stetson’s ability to move – we’ve got to figure out the pieces that fit best for us offensively and that’s part of what fall camp is about.”

Figuring out the pieces starts at quarterback where Stetson Bennett departs. With Carson Beck, Brock Vandagriff and Gunner Stockton all still competing for the starting job, each brings something a little bit different to the table, and the offense that ultimately gets run will be shaped to their specific skillset.

Then come the weapons around the signal caller. What does Georgia’s running back situation look like with several Bulldogs banged up at the position? How many are available, and are any of them as present in the passing game as Kenny McIntosh last season? Will a tight end step up to fill the role that Darnell Washington played or is Georgia going to be more reliant on a deep group of receivers this year? As Bobo said, determining all of that is the focus of fall camp.

“Day one in the first meeting we talk about competition to our players and building depth, but it’s not competition necessarily going against the defense, it’s competition between position groups. There’s competition between the tight ends and the receivers. Are our tight ends going to step up and we’re still going to be a lot of 12 or are we going to have to be more 11? Those are the things that you’re figuring out through camp,” Bobo said.

Of course the transition from Monken to Bobo is a factor in changing the offense some too. While he confirmed that the terminology is going to stay the same to make life easier on the players, different coordinators rely on different aspects of an offense to get the job done. That, combined with the strengths of the players that year, shape the identity of the offense.

“You want to keep the terminology the same for the players. There’ll be little nuances that change of how we do things and a lot of what’s our identity going to be offensively,” Bobo said. “You might see some changes if our identity changes of who we are offensively. We don’t have a guy that can possibly extend plays as well. We have two of those guys who can but Stetson had elite quickness and the ability to get yourself out of trouble. We don’t have a 6-7 280-pound tight end so I think you’ll see some different things there and I think it would have been a little bit different anyway no matter who is standing up here.”

Bobo – last the Georgia offensive coordinator in 2014 when the Bulldogs set a school record for points per game averaging 41.3, just ahead of last year’s Monken coached offense that averaged 41.1 points per game – has also added some things to his bag of tricks since last being in this position. Learning from his experiences as head coach at Colorado State (2015-2019), as offensive coordinator at South Carolina (2020) and Auburn (2021), plus the time he spent with Monken, Bobo’s learned a thing or two that’ll impact his decisions, not just in-game but on a day-to-day basis.

Georgia opens the season at home on September 2nd against UT-Martin. The Bulldogs will hold their first of two scrimmages in the preseason on Saturday, an opportunity for Bobo to see how his players operate in the most game-like situation possible.

“At the end of the day, you have to put the best guys on the field to give you the best chance to be successful,” Bobo said. “And then we want to build depth. If there’s multiple people that can do multiple things that increases our volume as an offense with more things that we can do. So we’re still trying to figure that out at practice. We’ve got a good feel for it right now, but we’ve still got to go play on Saturday in a scrimmage and fine tune things the next 8-9 days until the second scrimmage is over.”