Any time that a defense can effectively rush the quarterback it can, and often does, flip a game on its head. Look no further than the generational defense that the Georgia Bulldogs employed in 2021. That group was most known for its ability to keep opponents out of the endzone (9.5 points allowed per game), but the pass rush was just as impressive. That group, led by former defensive coordinator Dan Lanning and future number-one overall pick Travon Walker, was top-five in all of college football with 41 team sacks.
Through five weeks in 2022, that hasn’t been the case for this Bulldog defense. Gone are many of the key contributors to that total, and most importantly Dan Lanning is off to Eugene, Oregon. Despite being able to boast another top-four defense, the pass rush hasn’t been showing up the way it needs to.
Brandon Adams joined College Football Gametime on Saturday morning ahead of the Bulldogs’ tilt with the Auburn Tigers to discuss the struggling pass rush. He was rather frank about the issues the unit is having, but he took things a step further and gave a magic number that they will need to touch if they want to repeat as National Champions in January.
“Georgia is missing Dan Lanning as defensive coordinator,” Brandon told the guys. “I'll tell you why I feel that way. If you go back and look at like kind of the pre-Dan Lanning defenses in 2016, 2017, 2018. These were teams that were statistically very good defensively, but they were pretty conservative [with the pass rush].”
Between Kirby Smart’s first year in Athens in 2016 and Dan Lanning’s promotion to defensive coordinator in 2019, Georgia never finished in the top-half of the SEC in sack totals. Those groups averaged 1.89 sacks per game compared to 2.81 in the years under Lanning and two top-three finished in the SEC.
“With Lanning as defensive coordinator, that [difficulty] sort of changed,” Adams continued. “We didn't really change in 2019 -- that was his first year. By 2020, in a pandemic year when the season was shorter, Georgia was actually sacking the quarterback at a higher rate than it had ever done before."
In its run to the national title in 2021, Georgia was able to take advantage of its aggressive defense to get to the quarterback 41 times in the regular season and another eight times in the playoffs. How much of that directly is correlated to the former Georgia defensive coordinator remains to be seen, but the unit simply must see some improvement if it wants to reach the heights it has grown accustomed to.
Brandon went back to what history has told us about the successful teams in the College Football Playoff era. Looking back at the last eight years of teams that won a national championship, the team with the lowest sack total is LSU from 2019 (37 sacks).
The difference was that team had a Heisman winner at quarterback, two future first-round wide receivers, and is widely considered to be one of the greatest offensive teams in the history of college football. The Bulldogs are good on offense, but it would be a fool’s errand to compare those two in this regard.
So, besides the Bengal Tigers, what is that number that Georgia needs to reach?
“Every team besides LSU in this playoff ERA and the full season category has had at least 40,” Brandon confirmed with the guys. “So that's kind of a magic number for me, and Georgia has got to pick up the pace to get there. Right now, they're just not sacking the quarterback enough, and also they're probably not getting enough tackles for loss right now either.”
Coming into this afternoon’s matchup with Auburn, the Bulldogs sit at six team sacks on the season. If this number is to be believed, the Georgia Bulldogs certainly have some work cut out for them.
