The Georgia Bulldogs will enter the 2024 college football season having won 30 of their past 31 games, a sizzling stretch that contains the 2021 and 2022 national championships.
That one setback was last December’s 27-24 loss to Alabama in the Southeastern Conference title contest. It was a defeat that knocked the Bulldogs from first to sixth in the final College Football Playoff rankings and eliminated them in the quest to become the first program to win three consecutive Associated Press national championships.
“You realize you can lose,” Bulldogs junior safety Malaki Starks said as the SEC’s annual media days continued Tuesday in Dallas. “I had never even thought about it.”
Surely that three-point defeat against Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide has to be the rallying point for 2024, right?
“We’re dealing with new challenges this year, and we don’t have a chip on our shoulder in terms of people trying to use that as motivation,” Georgia ninth-year coach Kirby Smart said. “I’ve never used a failure from the previous year as motivation, and I’ve never used a success of a previous year as motivation. We won’t do that this year. That’s not who we are.