No. 2 Georgia heads to Fayetteville on Saturday afternoon to open SEC play, and Kirby Smart is making sure his team doesn’t confuse a pair of blowout wins with being battle-tested.
The Bulldogs have rolled through Tennessee State and Western Kentucky by a combined 133-23, and Smart’s group has barely had to stay on the field deep into either game. That changes now. Georgia (2-0) enters conference play against Arkansas (1-1), and Smart made clear that road trips in this league tend to expose teams fast.
“Playing on the road in the SEC, humility is always a week away,” Smart said. “It's a tough environment regardless of where you play in the SEC. There are no bad environments; there are only raucous environments.”
Smart has been perfect in SEC road openers at Georgia, going 10-0, but he isn’t leaning on that as comfort. The Bulldogs have been able to empty the bench in the second half of both of their first two games, which means there’s still a lot left to learn about where this team really stands.
“I’m just happy we’ve played hard and coached hard,” Smart said. “I don't know that there's a measuring stick of on-field performance.
You can't really measure that with the number of snaps they've had. I look at it as day-to-day interaction, work ethic and buy-in.”
The offense has been efficient whenever Gunner Stockton has been on the field. In 11 drives across the first two games, the senior has directed touchdowns on every one of them. Stockton is 28-for-32 for 436 passing yards and eight touchdowns, while junior running back Nate Frazier has produced four rushing touchdowns on 10 carries for 127 yards.
Arkansas, meanwhile, is coming off the SEC’s roughest result of the young season. First-year coach Ryan Silverfield watched his team get handled 43-10 at then-No. 20 Utah on Saturday, and the Razorbacks are already trying to regroup before facing another major challenge.
“There should be hurt, there should be frustration, but the ability and the approach and the attitude we need is to get it fixed and get it fixed right now,” Silverfield said. “Now it's putting the blinders on and putting 100% of our focus on Georgia. We're not going to walk around with a loser mentality with our heads draped down.”
Quarterback KJ Jackson, a junior, won the job over the summer after impressing the new staff and had started Arkansas’ season finale a year ago. But in his third career start last week, he struggled badly, completing 14 of 34 passes for 139 yards and throwing his second interception of the season.
Silverfield said the issues have been hard to ignore, but he’s banking on Jackson’s growth showing up as the season moves along.
“I don't know why it's not translating. I've had to sit down with KJ and talk through it,” Silverfield said of Jackson’s rough play.
“What you hope is every opportunity, every experience he gets on the field, he's going to continue to improve. The good news is that he's a smart, hard-working young man.
I think we're going to see strides in the right direction.'
Arkansas has now lost 11 straight conference games and hasn’t beaten Georgia since September 2010. The teams have met only three times since that win, with the most recent matchup a 37-0 Georgia victory in 2021.
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