ROWE: Best yet to come for Georgia offense

Fifty one points is nothing to scoff at. Fifty one points against a ranked SEC team, even at home, is really impressive. That’s what Georgia did on Saturday night as it scored on its first six drives of the game and had it not been for a drop from one of the best players in College Football, a rare one, the Bulldogs would have had touchdowns on their first five possessions.

UGA ran the football when it wanted to, threw the ball when it wanted to, and I don’t think that’s the best version of the offense you see this season. If the Bulldog offensive engine is a 5.7-liter V8, it’s only clicking on six, maybe seven, cylinders right now.

As it stands, Georgia has weathered a pretty wild storm on the injury front. It’s pretty clear that Brock Bowers was dinged up earlier in the season. There’s no other way to explain three targets and one catch for three yards against Ball State in week two. He looks healthy now.

Ladd McConkey, the team’s top wideout from a year ago, missed the first four games with back spasms and has been back in the fold for the past two contests. It was quickly apparent how much he means to the offense when, on his first snap of the season, Carson Beck went to him on 3rd and 9, a play that picked up 11 yards and a first down. While the junior playmaker is back, he’s not vintage McConkey just yet as he’s trying to play and practice himself into football shape. He caught just one pass in the drubbing of Kentucky.

Then there’s the injury to star right tackle Amarius Mims, maybe Georgia’s best shot at a first-round pick in the 2023 NFL Draft. Credit Xavier Truss for flipping from left guard to right tackle and the duo of Dylan Fairchild and Micah Morris for jumping in at left guard to make the transition borderline seamless.

Oh, I almost forgot about Daijun Edwards, the team’s leading rusher despite missing the first two games, and bruising running mate Kendall Milton. After suffering a sprained MCL during preseason practice, Edwards is still wearing a brace nut has piled up a couple of games of 100 total yards since returning. Milton has looked healthy for just one game this season and, surprise, he looked the best he has all season.

Five of the Bulldogs’ best offensive players, all injured to varying degrees, and Georgia, thanks to a manageable schedule no doubt, managed to say unbeaten with its arrow pointing straight up. That last part is key.

Why Georgia will continue to trend up

Continuing on with the injury theme, each of the players previously mentioned should only get healthier over the next couple of weeks. Vanderbilt awaits this week and while you never say never in the SEC, let’s be real. Georgia should be able to handle business in the Music City.

Edwards, Milton, and McConkey are getting more comfortable with their health and in better shape. Bowers is currently producing at the highest level of his already-storied career and that’s saying plenty. Mims should be back within the next few weeks and the Bulldogs don’t even have to consider rushing him.

But there’s more to it than those guys and their progression off injury. You also have to consider what (or who) Georgia found when it was searching for answers.

Marcus Rosemy-Jacksaint, a highly-rated wideout coming out of high school who battled injuries for his first two years on campus, is one of the most underrated players in the league. He’s UGA’s second-leading receiver and at 65 yards per game, he ranks No. 14 in the SEC. He’s a leader, he’s a blocker, and, as he showed against Kentucky, he’s a playmaker.

The transfer duo of Dominic Lovett and Rara Thomas, despite still learning the offense and working to achieve full integration, made enough plays to get Georgia through a stretch where the passing game was trying to find its way. Conventional wisdom says that those two haven’t come close to playing their best ball yet, especially when you see what they did against SEC competition a season ago while Lovett was at Missouri and Thomas was at Mississippi State.

It’s not hard to find someone very close to or inside the program who is pretty fired up about the near future with the wideouts becoming healthier and more comfortable, the running game getting back to full speed, and Mims rejoining the lineup. But it all comes back to the one guy who has been there from the first snap of the season and he’s getting better, too.

I could write paragraphs and pages and everything in between about the importance of the quarterback position and the value of experience behind center. But, for brevity’s sake, let’s just say it like this. Through six games the fourth-year sophomore has yet to take a step back. The moment has yet to be too big for him. Beck has played his best ball when it has been needed most. If you wanted to contend that his upward trajectory is the steepest of all, I wouldn’t argue.

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