Oregon first-year football coach Dan Lanning isn’t revealing any personnel details heading into Saturday’s showdown between the No. 11 Ducks and No. 3 Georgia in Atlanta’s Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game, especially at quarterback.
That’s apparently fine with Bulldogs counterpart Kirby Smart.
“I know who the quarterback is going to be,” Smart said Monday during his first weekly news conference of the 2022 season. “I’m not worried about that. I’m worried a lot more about how our guys play and what our guys do and how our guys execute. You guys can use that to write about and talk about, but regardless of which quarterback is in there, they are going to do what they do.
“At the end of the day, they may play both of them. It’s never about the preparation for one specific quarterback as much as the preparation of your team to go play well.”
While the reigning national champions are set at quarterback with former walk-on Stetson Bennett, who has started a majority of Georgia’s games each of the past two seasons, the Ducks have been employing a three-man competition involving senior transfer Bo Nix and redshirt freshmen Jay Butterfield and Ty Thompson. Nix, the transfer from Auburn, is considered to be the solid favorite.
Nix, unlike Bennett, arrived at Auburn amid great fanfare and delivered right out of the gate, connecting with Seth Williams for a 26-yard touchdown pass with nine seconds remaining for a 27-21 topping of Oregon at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. He would cap his freshman season in 2019 by leading the Tigers to a 48-45 stunning of Alabama, eliminating the Crimson Tide from the College Football Playoff for the one and only time.
There would be memorable performances in wins over LSU during Nix’s sophomore and junior seasons, but defeating Georgia has been another matter entirely.
Nix went 0-3 while at Auburn with the Bulldogs, losing those contests by the average score of 27-10. Georgia yielded just one passing touchdown to Nix in the three meetings while sacking him nine times.
“He is very athletic, and he can improvise a lot,” Bulldogs fifth-year senior safety Christopher Smith said. “When he was at Auburn, they were averaging upwards of 30 points a game when he was playing. He is definitely a gamer, and he is a very familiar opponent.
“We have good rapport with him, so we are definitely going to use the past to get ready for him this game, but it’s a new offense, a new offensive coordinator, a new head coach and things like that, so things are going to be different that we have to be ready for.”
Oregon’s new head coach spent the past four seasons helping build Georgia into the nation’s most dominating defense a year ago, as the Bulldogs allowed just 10.2 points per game. Five members of that defense were NFL first-round selections, but plenty of familiar faces are back with Smith, cornerback Keelee Ringo, outside linebacker Nolan Smith and defensive tackle Jalen Carter.
Smart is off to a 3-0 start against former assistants, having won twice over Arkansas and Sam Pittman and once over South Carolina’s Shane Beamer.
“On a personal level, I don’t think the game has anything to do with that, and neither Dan nor I will be worried about each other during the game,” Smart said. “It’s not about that. He’s fighting to do the best job he can for his organization and his players, and I’m doing the same here. We have mutual respect for each other — always have, always will.
“It’s about our players getting a chance to compete against their players, and as far as the familiarities of the two systems, there probably is a little overlap there in terms of the defenses. They’re watching our defense, and we watch our defense to get ready for them.”
As for the defenders Lanning left behind, they’re just ready to create another special season of their own.
“This game is meant to have fun,” Nolan Smith said. “I just want to have fun with my guys and have all 11 guys playing the same call and getting our hats to the football and swarming and flying. That’s the connection we’re looking for, and that’s the only thing that we can control.”
Bulldogs bites
The only previous meeting between Georgia and Oregon took place in 1977, with the Bulldogs winning 27-16 in Athens. … The Ducks are among just eight Bowl Subdivision teams that return all five starters on their offensive line. … The Bulldogs opened this summer as 14.5-point favorites over Oregon, but that number was 17.5 Monday night.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.