UNEVEN BREAK
Bulldogs ready for rest after emotional victory
ATHENS, Ga. — The Georgia Bulldogs have an open date this week, and coach Kirby Smart has never met an open date he didn’t like.
Georgia improved to 4-0 this football season with Saturday night’s 23-17 triumph over Notre Dame inside an electric Sanford Stadium containing a record crowd of 93,246. The Bulldogs held steady at No. 3 in Sunday’s Associated Press poll, while the Fighting Irish dropped to 2-1 and slipped from No. 7 to No. 10.
The Bulldogs will resume play Oct. 5, when they visit Tennessee. The Volunteers (1-3) also have an open date this week.
“I always think that the open date comes at the right time, and it’s best when it comes after a win,” Smart said during a news conference as Saturday night gave way to Sunday morning. “We had a long open date last year, so this makes that part much better. Whether we had won or lost this game, we still had big games to play and still controlled our own destiny.
“We just have a lot glaring things we’ve got to work on to get better.”
Saturday night’s game had a 6.2 rating, according to CBS, making it the most-watched college football game of the 2019 season.
Georgia’s lone open date last season occurred after its 36-16 loss at LSU, but the Bulldogs bounced back from their time off with key double-digit wins over Florida, Kentucky and Auburn. The Bulldogs have two open dates this season, with their second one set for the final Saturday in October.
Broadcast information for the Georgia-Tennessee game should be announced today, with a night kickoff likely given that the contest between No. 7 Auburn and No. 9 Florida in Gainesville would be the logical CBS afternoon selection.
Georgia could wrap an 8-2 decade against Tennessee and break a 23-23-2 series deadlock with a win in Knoxville, but
the Bulldogs are expected to spend this week focusing on themselves.
“We’re going to get some guys back who have been hurt,” senior safety J.R. Reed said. “We’ll get them healthy and let them heal up and move on.”
Said junior quarterback Jake Fromm: “We’re going to go to work. We’ll do a lot of good on good and get better.”
Georgia displayed some good and not so good against the Irish, with a troubling aspect of the victory being sophomore Jake Camarda averaging 35.2 yards on four punts. Camarda’s first punt took place from Georgia’s 15-yard line and traveled 25 yards, and his final kick with two minutes remaining went 27 yards and gave Notre Dame possession at its 48-yard line in a 23-17 game.
“He’s an unbelievable punter,” Smart said. “He just didn’t have great punts tonight. We’ll go back to the drawing board and keep getting him better.”
Georgia’s top strength may have been a defense that limited the Irish to 46 rushing yards. The Bulldogs have allowed an average of 57.0 rushing yards per game, which ranks fifth nationally.
“I felt like we did a great job,” Bulldogs senior middle linebacker Tae Crowder said. “We held a great team to 17 points, and we’ll take that. We handled the adversity at the end, and we like times like that.”
Odds and ends
The Bulldogs improved to 6-3 against top-10 teams during the Smart era. … Saturday marked the first time the Bulldogs won a game after trailing at halftime since the Rose Bowl national semifinal after the 2017 season. … Senior kicker Rodrigo Blankenship has scored 358 career points, which is fourth in Georgia history behind Blair Walsh (412), Billy Bennett (409) and Marshall Morgan (407).