By: Robert Craft

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

If anyone’s wondering how important Georgia’s showdown against Tennessee is on Saturday, let me tell you.

Win, and all is OK, full steam ahead to the College Football Playoffs and perhaps even a National Championship.

Lose, this season is set, but not in a good way.

It’s not ideal for any team to lose football games, but it happens. It’s much less ideal to try to clean up two viral messes from that loss. It’s even less ideal to field a question about whether to change quarterbacks.

The first viral moment: Carson Beck, starting and beleaguered quarterback, was spotted smiling on the bench as he spoke with backup quarterback Jaden Rashada during the fourth quarter of Georgia’s 28-10 loss to Ole Miss (UGA’s largest point margin loss in five years).

The visual was seized as a symbol of what’s wrong with Beck and perhaps the entire Bulldog football team.

The optics were poor and out of context: Harlen Rashada, Jaden’s father, posted, showing the moment before, Beck not smiling, Jaden Rashada telling him something that made him laugh.

Here the internet had birthed yet another out-of-context viral moment.

Beck’s on-field play has noticeably regressed. The easy excuse is he wasn’t focused during the offseason, between his Lambo and his personal life. Beck told me in the spring he wasn’t working any less, he was taking time to enjoy life after four years of hard work, which he certainly had earned.

We have seen many young athletes enjoy their life as a college student, and still thrive on the field.

It also feels invalid to attribute the offensive troubles to Beck’s leadership. He’s never been a rah-rah quarterback, and Stetson Bennett wasn’t either.

The difference might be the leaders around Beck. Nobody appears to have filled the void left by center Sedrick Van Pran. There isn’t an obvious alpha personality on the other side of the ball the way this year’s defense has Jalen Walker.

But the defense shouldn’t be absolved of blame, either. It came up huge in the wins over Texas and Clemson but also gave up big plays at Ole Miss, started soft against Alabama and has earned a reputation of inconsistency, ranking eighth in the SEC in defensive yards per play.

It’s not like a great defense is being wasted. A ton of world-class athletes on defense aren’t playing to their potential. Luckily for them, there’s still time. There’s still time for the whole team.

In the wide scope of this season, going 10-2 with this schedule is perfectly acceptable.

The focus then moves to how Georgia performs in the Playoff, where pressure still waits, but the minimum threshold of making the dance has been hit.

Missing the Playoff, meanwhile, would in the kindest interpretation mean that Georgia was a flawed team undone by a brutal schedule.

The harsher takeaway would be that the schedule exposed a team that isn’t very good and the program has work to do this offseason to get back to status.

Even then, perspective is needed. This is a program that has won two of the past three national championships, then fell short but still went 13-1. If anyone has earned leeway to slip its Georgia.

If any coach has shown he can adapt and make needed changes, it’s Smart. Panicky fans need to touch grass.

Georgia may feel a lot better after Saturday. Through these years of winning Smart has loved to say that “humility is a week away.” Well, humility is here, and so is the chance for redemption.