If the Alabama-Georgia regular-season game 10 weeks ago in Athens had come out 28-7 Georgia, few people would have been surprised.
Whether Alabama’s eventual 24-21 win will be looked back upon as shocking or not depends on a couple of things: how Alabama finishes from here on out, and whether QB Ty Simpson is the guy that beat Georgia in September, or the guy who has limped to the finish line with a handful of average performances over the season’s final weeks.
This was the Georgia team everyone expected in 2025: dominating on defense, no mistakes on offense, and with a general talent level that would let Kirby Smart and his staff play the game just about any way they wanted to play it. This was, unfortunately, also the Alabama team that everyone feared it would see pop up at some point during several weeks of 2025 after watching Alabama disintegrate against Florida State in the opener. Kalen DeBoer and his staff had done an excellent job turning the bus around after that mess, but the margins looked thin at times, and Georgia finally burst right through all of them.
One could make the argument that Alabama’s injury situation is the difference between now and September, but against Georgia in the SEC Championship Game, we’re not sure how much that difference really is. There certainly is a difference on defense without DE L.T. Overton in the mix – and we’ll touch on that in depth in the breakdown below – but the entire running back group is a basket of unanswered questions, whether or not Jam Miller is in the mix, and Alabama did a good job replacing TE Josh Cuevas in this game.
What it looked like to us, to boil it down to one simple sentence, is that Georgia has gotten a lot better since Sept. 27, and Alabama hasn’t.
Alabama can be forgiven somewhat, because after the Florida State loss, the Crimson Tide was written off by all the college football world, and knew that at most, it could afford to lose one more game all year against a monstrous schedule. And that’s just what Alabama did. Alabama came into this game the top seed in the SEC, and felt at the time as if it had locked up an appearance in the College Football Playoff whether this game ended in a win or a loss.
We’ll see if the CFP Committee still agrees.
Defensively, Alabama did enough in this game. Three of Georgia’s four touchdowns came on short fields thanks to miscues on offense. If Alabama cuts the offensive miscues in half, this is probably a one-score game late, albeit one Georgia would probably still have won.
But the question for Alabama fans now is, what kind of team does the Crimson Tide really have at this point? There hasn’t been any official word about Overton’s situation, but it’s believed to be season-ending based on speculation from insiders in Tuscaloosa. Miller has a leg injury, as does LG Kam Dewberry, and foot injuries like the ones to Cuevas and Danny Lewis Jr. can be notoriously slow to heal.
But more than the injury questions, are now the questions about Alabama’s makeup. DeBoer’s offense is heavily quarterback-centric. Anyone who watched his final season at Washington knows this. Whether you’re talking about Michael Penix Jr., Ty Simpson, or even the few times in 2024 in which Jalen Milroe played a high level, the end result is the same: DeBoer and Grubb are nigh-unbeatable when the quarterback is playing well, but very average when the quarterback is not.
If Alabama is still on the CFP invitation list – and we think it’s likely, but not a guarantee – then Alabama is going to have to rekindle its early autumn magic and do it quickly. Simpson has to get better. The offensive line has to get better. The running game has to be totally pulled out of a ditch.
But if tonight was the end of championship road, and all that’s left is a meaningless bowl game somewhere outside the confines of the CFP, Alabama can be proud of a lot of things it has done this season, and angered by others, with 2026 looming as a chance to put into practice everything that has been learned over the past two seasons since Nick Saban retired.
Here’s the Five-Point Breakdown for Alabama-Georgia:
1. Simpson looked timid, stared down his first option, and once again was late with decisions. What gives? We hate to put so much of the loss on the quarterback position, but as we said in the summary above, when the offense is designed to be heavily QB-centric, you get what you got. In this case, Alabama got a mediocre-at-best performance from Simpson. Too many balls were thrown into traffic, too many defenders able to lock onto throwing lanes and tip passes, too many decisions made a second or two too late. Compare Simpson’s tape against Georgia in September to what he put up against Georgia in December; he doesn’t look like the same quarterback. We even called for Alabama to change QBs heading into the fourth quarter, because we’re at the point in the season now where people’s feelings don’t matter. What matters is execution, and Simpson didn’t have it. The early interception was a killer, and there were several other passes thrown inaccurately in key situations. There’s likely no way to truly fix this so late in the year; you just hope Simpson either has an epiphany, or Bama gets a good draw in the playoffs (if it gets a draw at all) to face teams that can’t defend the pass well. That’s called drawing to an inside straight in the casino business, and the fact it may be Bama’s best chance right now shouldn’t cause any warm fuzzies.
2. OL was overpowered, especially once Georgia figured out there would be no running game forthcoming. Pressure was heavy and came from everywhere. Georgia sacked Simpson 3 times and recorded 6 PBUs; stats on QB hurries weren’t available in time to write this, but a number somewhere around 7-10 is expected once the final tallies are announced. The biggest problem was that the pressure came from everywhere. Geno VanDeMark was forced into service at left guard with Kam Dewberry out, but it didn’t go nearly as well as it went last week when VanDeMark had to take over for Parker Brailsford at center for long stretches. Arguably, things got better when Will Sanders entered the game. Communication seemed to be affected by something, whether it was crowd noise or just the eternal onslaught of bodies being thrown at them. Georgia was able to collapse the edges while getting good penetration against Brailsford, who still is clearly not 100 percent, and the guards. This is where offensive design begins to matter for reasons not solely relating to quarterback play: Alabama was unable to execute up front in the run game against Georgia’s DL, who flipped the script from September and clearly won their cross-matchup for this game. Alabama was also unable to correctly pass off pressure from the LB level.
3. Something is broken at running back. We’re not just talking about Kevin Riley’s jaw, either. Had Alabama had a completely healthy Jam Miller available, we’re not sure it would have made a huge difference, but there are still things Miller does better than Daniel Hill. Hill looks like he’d be most at home as a downhill runner in a scheme that prioritizes that kind of attack. He is sometimes awkward in space and isn’t fast enough to create his own seams. With Miller and Riley out, A.K. Dear showed that he still has a lot to learn at this level. We never saw Dre’lyn Washington nor Richard Young, but we probably didn’t have to. This is an area of the offense that needs not just a talent-side rebuild, but possibly a change in the coaching, whether it’s the assistant itself or at least the philosophies being taught. Going back again to DeBoer’s final season at Washington, Dillon Johnson was injured before the final game and the results looked a like these from today, when the backups were called upon. Alabama basically played passing skels against Georgia today without benefit of a running game, and that’s never going to work against the Bulldogs.
4. It’s a different defense without L.T. Overton in it. Before we jump into that, understand that Alabama’s defense probably did enough to win the game. Georgia had just one significant drive, and racked up just 297 total yards. The offense and special teams units seemed determined to put the defense into impossible situations all day. But without L.T. Overton at Bandit end, the Alabama defense has a much different feel. We wondered how Alabama would fill the hole, and the Tide chose to do it almost exclusively with a next-man-up kind of approach, starting Jordan Renaud and using Keon Keeley in more situations than usual. The problem with that is Renaud plays much smaller than Overton, usually getting work on later downs. Keeley is more like Renaud for now than he is Overton, although with the rate Keeley is outgrowing positions, he just might be the guy next year for the spot. Losing Overton was every bit as impactful as losing Tim Keenan at defensive tackle was earlier in the year. Overton is strong enough to be able to apply pressure on passing downs but also to control his edge of the defense against the running game. We’re being told he’s done for the season, so wherever Alabama goes from here, they’ll do it on the backs of Renaud and Keeley.
5. Miscues blew this game open. DeBoer’s decision to go for a fourth down deep in his own territory late in the game should be saluted for its courage, but it ended up handing Georgia the touchdown that might wind up being the difference between a playoff invitation and not getting one. But the game was already on its way to being over by that point. The poor handling of punt protection that led to the blocked kick … several drops by Bama receivers … Simpson’s devolving footwork leading to poorly-thrown balls and poorly-chosen routes … it was a conflagration of errors that came together to take away any chance Alabama had of upsetting Georgia – and yes, it would have been an upset had Alabama won. There hasn’t been an Alabama-Georgia game since sometime back in the Ray Goff or Jim Donnan years in which Alabama could bring its B- or C-game and expect to win, and there won’t be one of those coming for some time in the future. But that’s exactly what Alabama brought to Atlanta tonight.
Follow Jess Nicholas on X at @TideFansJessN