With the Georgia Bulldogs’ 2024 season concluded, it is time to assess the success of this year’s team.

The Georgia Bulldogs’ turbulent 2024 college football season came to a disappointing end Thursday afternoon as they were defeated by the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the Allstate Sugar Bowl and eliminated from the 2024 College Football Playoff bracket. The loss marked the Dawgs’ third of the season and is just the third three-loss season of Kirby Smart’s career.

With the season freshly in the rearview and no national championship to show for it, some have taken the liberty to label the Dawgs’ 2024 campaign as a failure. But while there were numerous shortcomings (more than expected) from this year’s team, is the Georgia Bulldogs 2024 season a complete failure?

Georgia entered the season as the odds-on favorite to win the national championship and seemed poised to continue its recent successes after opening the season with two dominating wins. One against the Clemson Tigers, a top-25-ranked team that would eventually reach the College Football Playoff. But the signs of the Bulldogs’ inconsistency began showing in week three when the Bulldogs narrowly escaped an unranked Kentucky team on the road after an extremely poor offensive showing.

Following the bye week, Georgia suffered its first regular season loss in nearly four years after the Alabama Crimson Tide jumped out to a massive early lead, eventually resulting in a 41-34 loss for the Bulldogs. The Dawgs would follow up the loss with two modest wins against middling SEC opponents before heading to Austin, Texas, to take on the No.1 ranked Longhorns in a season-defining matchup.

Georgia handled Texas’ offensive attack on the road and won by a score of 30-15, which greatly boosted the Dawgs’ national title odds, as well as their team’s morale. However, after a close bout with the Florida Gators and an embarrassing loss to Ole Miss on the road, Georgia’s playoff hopes seemed to be hanging on by a thread.

The Dawgs closed out the regular season with three straight home victories, including a top-10 win over the Tennessee and an 8OT instant classic against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. The stars aligned perfectly through this stretch and Texas A&M and Alabama upsets allowed the Bulldogs to earn a bid in the SEC Championship where they would rematch the Texas Longhorns.

Disaster struck at the conclusion of the first half of the championship game, as quarterback Carson Beck suffered a season-ending injury to his throwing arm. Backup Gunner Stockton would then lead the Dawgs to an overtime victory, crowing them as SEC champions and providing a bye-week in the 12-team College Football Playoff. It would be the final win of Georgia’s season as they would suffer elimination at the hands of the Fighting Irish just weeks later.

What doomed Georgia in the Sugar Bowl proved to be the same issues the Dawgs had experienced all season. More than ever, slow offensive starts, dropped passes, inopportune turnovers, and inconsistent defensive play continuously created uphill battles for the Bulldogs to overcome just to win and Thursday’s hole proved to be too deep to crawl out of.

The sporadic play that Georgia showed all season is certainly far from the standard Kirby Smart and his staff have created and was extremely disheartening to watch at times. In addition, three losses suffered this year were more than any other Bulldog team has endured in more than 5 seasons. All of this is to say that Georgia’s 2024 season was one of the more disappointing of the Kirby Smart era. But calling it a failure may be a stretch.

While things certainly didn’t go as planned for this year’s team, it should be noted that this year’s college football season was anything but ordinary for every team. The 12-team playoff, conference expansion, full-blown transfer portal, and NIL chaos all contributed to a season that would already make recreating the success of previous seasons much more difficult.

In addition, Georgia’s schedule was easily the most difficult in Georgia’s history. The Dawgs faced three top-ten teams during the regular season (with two being on the road) and went without a home game during a month-long stretch of the season. It should also be noted that Georgia also suffered an unprecedented amount of injuries throughout the year as well.

There are a plethora of reasons to be disappointed or frustrated by Georgia’s 2024 season, and it is safe to say that the year as a whole was nothing short of a letdown. But in one of the most turbulent seasons of college football, the Bulldogs were able to deliver on a handful of games, bring home an SEC Championship, maintain their home win streak, and provide fans with a handful of memories that will live on in Bulldog history. It wasn’t a perfect season, but Georgia’s 2024 campaign was far from a catastrophic failure.

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