Georgia's 2025 Comes Down to One Question Nobody in Athens Can Answer Yet

Aug 28, 2025
3 min read

Here's the thing about being the Georgia Bulldogs.

The expectations never reset. Doesn't matter who left for the NFL, who hit the portal, who's untested. Every August the Dawgs are ranked in the top five and everybody pencils them into the Playoff, and this year is no different — Georgia opens the season ranked in the top five for the eighth year in a row, riding an SEC-record 31-game win streak.

But underneath all that, this team has one question hanging over it that nobody in Athens can answer yet. And the whole season runs through it.

The quarterback question

Carson Beck took his NFL talent and transferred to Miami in the offseason, which left Georgia handing the keys to Gunner Stockton — a fourth-year guy who has barely played.

Now, Stockton's not a total unknown. He came off the bench in the SEC Championship and helped close out a win against Texas, then made his first career start in the Sugar Bowl against Notre Dame. There's a reason the staff trusts him, he's a proven SEC starter, and Kirby Smart knows it. He wouldn't even officially name Stockton the starter when reporters pushed him on it last week.

That tells you everything. When a coach won't say the obvious out loud, he's protecting a young player and keeping the pressure off. Smart's done this before. The good ones know when to shield a quarterback from the noise.

So the question isn't whether Stockton is talented. It's whether he can hold u

p when the schedule turns into a meat grinder. Which brings us to the part that should worry Dawg fans.

The schedule does not do them any favors

Georgia eases in the season with Marshall and Austin Peay to start, and good — Stockton needs reps before the real stuff hits hard and fast as it always does in the SEC.

September 13, the Dawgs go to Knoxville to face Tennessee. Two weeks after that, Alabama comes to Athens. That's a brutal two-step for a quarterback making essentially his third and fourth career starts, and it's only the beginning. Ole Miss and Texas are waiting later in the year. There's no soft stretch where a young QB gets to settle in. He's got to grow up in real time, against real defenses, on the road.

Everywhere else, they're loaded

The good news is that around the quarterback, this is still Georgia. The defense is fast and big the way Smart's defenses always are. Special teams have quietly become a weapon — the kicking game's been reliable for years now. The talent on this roster is not the issue. It never is.

The issue is the one position you can't fake. You can have the best defense in the country and the deepest roster in the league, and if your quarterback can't handle a third-down throw with the season on the line in Knoxville, none of it matters.

What I think happens

I think Stockton's better than the doubters expect, because Smart wouldn't have handed him the job if he didn't believe it. I think the Tennessee and Alabama games early are going to tell us exactly who this team is before October even gets here. And I think the ceiling is another SEC title and a Playoff run — the floor is two or three losses if the quarterback play wobbles.

It's going to be interesting. And in this league, interesting means hard.

Buckle up. We start Saturday.