Week five coaches poll still has Georgia in No. 1 spot
Georgia didn’t play yesterday as it enjoyed one of its two bye weeks this season. The week off did little to sway voters in the US LBM / USA Today coaches’ poll as the Bulldogs are still in the No. 1 spot.
UGA did, however, lose seven first-place votes. That comes on the heels of losing eight the week before. Georgia garnered 35 such votes in the latest coaches poll with Texas coming in at No. 2 with 18 first-place votes. Ohio State remains at No. 3 with a pair of first-place votes.
Alabama and Ole Miss round out the top five, in that order, and Tennessee is up one spot to No. 6. That means that Georgia’s 2024 regular-season schedule now includes the nation’s No. 2, No. 4, No. 5, and No. 6 teams.
Oregon comes in at No. 7 followed by Penn State, Miami, and Utah, in that order, to round out the top 10. Georgia’s week-one opponent, Clemson, is back up to No. 15 after back to back wins. The Bulldogs beat the Tigers 34-3 inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium a couple of weeks ago.
Georgia is coming off an ugly showing at Kentucky. The Bulldogs trailed at the start of the fourth quarter but rallied to win 13-12. The narrow victory has had UGA fans talking all week about the offense and the struggles both up front and at quarterback. The slow starts have also been a problem.
“There are tons of them,” Kirby Smart said when asked about things Georgia can do to start faster. “Clean up what you do, do it at a higher rate, make good decisions, communicate better. It’s hard to say one thing on that because there’s a lot of things where, not a lot of things go wrong, but one thing going wrong can mess up a play and it takes one person messing up on offense. If one person messes up consecutively, you got three bad plays and certainly we just got to execute better, I think, and do a good job with guys doing what they do in practice. If we do what we do in practice and do it against good people, which they get a chance to do against real good people in practice, they’ll do it better. So, I don’t know if we can point to one thing on that.”
