It’s a rematch of last season’s SEC championship. The No. 2 Georgia Bulldogs will visit Saban Field at Bryant-Denny Stadium Saturday night against the No. 4 Alabama Crimson Tide.
In last December’s duel, the Crimson Tide took down the then-undefeated Bulldogs 27-24 in Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The win led to Alabama jumping four spots to the No. 4 overall seed in the College Football Playoff, knocking out Georgia and Florida State.
Since then, the Crimson Tide has changed. The day after Michigan took down Washington in the national championship, Nick Saban announced he’d be retiring as Alabama’s head coach. The program soon after hired former Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer to take over for Saban.
This Saturday, in DeBoer’s first SEC game, he will face a Kirby Smart Georgia team for the first time.
If there is one big difference between an Alabama team coached by Saban and an Alabama team coached by DeBoer, it’s the play style.
For 17 seasons, Saban’s teams were always known by fans as defense-first. These squads would force turnovers, apply pressure on opposing offenses and force mistakes that would lead to points for Alabama.
For DeBoer’s teams over the years, it has been quite the opposite.
In the four seasons before coming to Alabama, DeBoer coached two seasons at Fresno State and two seasons at Washington, leading his teams to average at least 32 points per game in every season. In 2022, DeBoer and Washington put up 39.7 points per game.
Even though the season is still young, the DeBoer-coached Crimson Tide has averaged 49 points per game through the first three games.
Since Kirby Smart took over the Bulldogs in 2015, his defense-first teams are much like Saban’s. In fact, after the first three games of the season, Smart has his team ranked fourth in the country in total defense, allowing just 3.5 yards per play and 202 yards per game.
Fans can expect DeBoer and the Alabama offense to push the ball up field more. Alabama ranks 86th in the country in time of possession, with an average of 29:10 per game. In the Crimson Tide’s most recent game against Wisconsin, Alabama held the ball under 26 minutes.
Expect the Bulldogs to try to slow the game down with a run-first offense that takes up time and keeps the ball away from the Alabama offense. Last season, Georgia ranked first overall in time of possession.
Although the Bulldogs fell to 93rd in time possession after holding the ball for just 24 minutes in their previous game against Kentucky, fans should expect Georgia to go back to its run-first approach to run down the clock and rack up possession time.
With the Georgia offense being run by the same coach and players as last season, it stands to reason that the team will aim to take a similar approach as before.
Overall, Saturday night’s matchup in Tuscaloosa will likely majorly influence who goes to the SEC championship in December and what seeding teams receive for the postseason.
Alabama and Georgia will kick off at 6:30 p.m. CT Saturday on ABC.
