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The Georgia football team will take on Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff quarterfinals at the Sugar Bowl on Thursday. These two teams were supposed to meet up on Wednesday night, but the game was postponed because of the tragic attack in New Orleans on Wednesday morning. The Bulldogs have had a lot of time off since winning the SEC title game, and they ended up getting an extra day.
Now that we have seen three of the four teams that received byes play, people are wondering if the time off is hurting. All three teams have gotten off to slow starts, and all three of them have lost. Will the same thing happen to the Georgia football team?
Former Alabama football head coach Nick Saban discussed how time off affects a college football team during an appearance on the Pat McAfee Show. In some cases, it can help. In other cases, it can hurt.
“I think Georgia, because of the experience they have playing in these games, and they've had to play games, playoff games, lots of playoff games where they had a significant amount of time off,” Nick Saban said. “I think Kirby's got a lot of experience managing that situation, probably doing it fairly similar to the way we did it. So, um, you never know if time off is a good thing, just like bye weeks. People talk about bye weeks during the season as being a good thing. Sometimes they're good things. Sometimes they're a bad thing.”
For Georgia, it might just end up being a good thing. The Bulldogs have a ton of talent, but they were dealing with some injuries at the end of the year. Now, they have had plenty of time to rest up.
“When your team has good momentum, you just want to keep playing and roll along,” Saban continued. “If your team's beat up and hurt and tired then you want to have time off, get them the rest and recovery. But I think every one of those things is circumstantial, and I think in Georgia's case, they had a lot of guys injured, you know, toward the end of the season. So they probably will benefit from having some time off, actually.”
It's going to be interesting to see how the Georgia football team looks out of the gate against this Notre Dame team that took down Indiana less than two weeks ago. So far, the three teams that received byes did not start their games strong.
Arizona State was down 14-3 after the first quarter before outscoring Texas 21-10 in the final three quarters. Boise State down 14-0 and then was outscored 17-14 in the final three quarters. Oregon was down 14-0 and then was outscored 27-21 in the final three quarters.
It is important to consider that the Sun Devils and Broncos were big underdogs in their game. Both squads were actually ranked lower than their opponent despite receiving a higher seed.
All three teams that got byes have lost so far, and Georgia is hoping to break that trend. The Bulldogs and Fighting Irish will kick off the Sugar Bowl from Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana at 4:00 ET on Thursday, and the game will be airing on ESPN. Notre Dame is currently favored by 1.5 points.
