Georgia’s game plan against Tennessee shows what makes the Dawgs so special

Photo by Steve Limentani/ISI Photos/Getty Images

The Bulldogs put together the most impressive defensive performance of the season on Saturday. Here’s how they did it.

“Young man, young man, your arms are too short to box with God.”

The Georgia-Tennessee game on Saturday was billed as the biggest game of the regular season to this point. The AP No. 1 team in the country was facing the College Football Playoff No. 1 team for the right to essentially go to the SEC title game, and put the winner in the drivers’ seat for the 1 seed in the College Football Playoff.

The Bulldogs silenced all critics in a decisive 27-13 victory that never felt as close as the score indicates. Georgia held a Tennessee offense that is one of, if not the best in the nation to 3.9 yards per play and 289 total yards of offense, well below their average of 7.1 yards per play and 532.6 yards per game.

“This is what we’re doing, this is how we’re doing it,” Kirby Smart said after the game. “We’re going to keep it simple, we’re gonna line up fast, we’re gonna strike blockers, we’re gonna keep the ball in front of us, we’re not going to let them get explosives, we’re going to affect the quarterback and we’re going to buy into it.”

We’ll get into how the Dawgs dismantled the Volunteers on Saturday, but first we have to understand the basic philosophies of the Tennessee offense.

PSP’s: Pace, Space and Stacks

Pace, space, and stacks are the three main takeaways watching the Volunteer offense. Offensive coordinator Alex Golesh and head coach Josh Heupel run a very vertical offense that prioritizes spacing and pace. It’s very similar to the Briles-era Baylor offenses that dominated the Big 12. Receivers are lined up far beyond the numbers on the football field, which forces the defense to extend their personnel all over the field, leaving wide gaps of open grass. This screenshot is from the Volunteer’s victory over Florida earlier this year. Look at how wide the receivers are, and how much space is vacated because the safety has to be by the two receivers.

What this spacing also does is create one on one matchups and defined looks for their QB, Hendon Hooker. If he likes what he sees, he can pull the trigger. If not, he can give the ball to the RB or run.

This space is made lethal by Tennessee by playing at an extremely fast pace. They get lined up and go quickly, and this forces the defense into getting plays and checks in at a rapid pace. Of course, this will cause mistakes.

The defining aspect of the Volunteer offense is how every play is attacking. They run plays AT you, in both the run and passing game. Golesh calls it a “vertical” run game, which plays off of how much space is given to them by opposing defenses. The Volunteer offensive line is physical and they want linebackers thinking pass so they run right at them.

In the passing game, they run a series of routes called “vertical choice” routes. A choice route is common in football, and it gives the receiving target the choice to break his route inside or outside, or sit in the hole of a zone defense. Well, Tennessee runs these, but 25-30 yards downfield. The receiver will try and win vertically against the corner, either running a go or post. If they don’t stack the corner (get the CB on his hip and past him), they’ll turn the route into a curl, eating up all the space that the Volunteer wide receivers get. When the Volunteers hit it, it hits HARD.

You’re probably wondering, “If they have so much space before the play, why not just press and close the gap?” Well, the Volunteers also get into stacks using motion or lining straight up into it. A receiver will be directly behind another receiver, meaning they can get a free release. From these, the Volunteers will run “switch” routes, where the receiver that’s on the line of scrimmage will run inside, and the receiver behind him will run outside.

Whew. Now that we got that out the way, let’s examine how the Bulldogs mitigated that.

Turning all the vertical choice routes into curls

A large part of why the Bulldogs were able to reign in an explosive Volunteer offense was by forcing the receivers to make the decision to turn their vertical choice routes into one singular option. The Bulldogs would play off coverage and bait the Tennessee wideouts into turning their routes into hitches and curls, then rally to make sure tackles. Hooker and the Volunteers averaged only 3.9 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt and only 60 Yards After Contact on 23 catches, for a measly 2.6 YAC per reception. The Georgia DBs are among the most physical group of tacklers in the country, and they rarely make mistakes.

On this play, electric Volunteers wide receiver Jalin Hyatt is in the slot, and he’s running like he wants to get the DB, Chris Smith, on his hip so he can go vertical. However, Smith doesn’t take the cheese and makes a great tackle short of the sticks.

The Bulldogs played a lot of man coverage and chose to live with giving the Volunteers all of the short routes, trusting their defensive backs to not allow anything explosive.

Georgia also handled those tricky stacks that I mentioned earlier. They did this by playing in press aligment, and they would play “lock” coverage, locking the defender onto a receiver, regardless of what they run. This gave the Bulldogs defense the ability to be physical at the press point and disrupt the timing. This Hendon Hooker scramble is an example of this. Out on the point man in Tennessee’s bunch is 6’4, 250 pound Robert Beal. He jams the point man so much that it throws off the timing of the play, and forces Hooker to scramble.

The Georgia defensive backs were the best unit on the field Saturday, and played a major role in neutralizing a lethal downfield passing game.

Dominating the line of scrimmage

This was one of the biggest aces Georgia had up their sleeve facing Tennessee. Whenever the Bulldogs play, they will have the advantage on the line of scrimmage. Tennessee is a spread-to-run team, meaning they try and get as little bodies in the tackle box in order to run the ball.

The problem with that is simple: Georgia is fine living this way. The way they play their defense, they want teams to bounce runs to the edge, where their banshees can make tackles for minimal gains. This happened multiple times, where runs had to get bounced because the Georgia defensive line was eating up gaps on the inside. This turned a vertical run game into a horizontal one, and Georgia wins in that matchup.

Georgia was getting free runners when they blitzed in the run game as well. They would send a linebacker on a five man pressure and most of the time the blitz wouldn’t necessarily get home, but it’s disrupting the blocking and filling holes that were supposed to be open. In a world where changing the picture in the secondary is king, Georgia changes the picture up front.

In the passing game, Georgia blitzed quite a bit, something that would go against conventional wisdom when playing an explosive offense like Tennessee. However, what they would do with these blitzes is speed up Hooker’s process as well as move him off base. Creator of Match Quarters Cody Alexander outlined a blitz called ALAMO, that sends 3 people through the A-gap, bold against Tennessee. What this does is gets immediate pressure in Hooker’s face. This is crucial because QBs like to move up in the pocket, and most college QBs don’t like making throws with a lot of guys in their face.

When the Bulldogs wouldn’t blitz, they wouldn’t try and bend the corner and give up rush lanes, no. They were trying to compress the pocket and make things uncomfortable for Hooker. Through the first nine games of the season, only nine of Hooker’s 131 dropbacks have been with shuffling or moving feet. This isn’t to say Hooker is a bad athlete, but he’s clearly more comfortable throwing on time and on platform. Georgia forced him to either throw short or off schedule, and if he broke the pocket, the Bulldogs would sack him. It’s a very disciplined gameplan.

Georgia has got the dudes

All of the things mentioned above are possible when you’re as LOADED as Georgia is on the defensive side of the ball. Some of the stars of the Tennessee game:

Jalen Carter: Top five NFL Draft prospect; 247 Sports five star prospect coming out of high school.

Malaki Starks: A FRESHMAN; 247 Sports five star prospect

Kelee Ringo: Top 20 NFL Draft prospect; 247 Sports five star prospect

Zion Logue: 247 Sports three star prospect

Jamon Dumas-Johnson: 247 Sports four star prospect

The reason they can live in this world of only having six or less guys in the box is because most of those guys are five and four stars who dominate at every level. They can play man because they recruit the best corners and safeties on Earth.

Football is very much X’s and O’s, but at the end of the day, it’s about the Jimmy’s and Joe’s. Georgia had the guys and executed their gameplan to a T, and it resulted in a dominant victory.