Michigan Football: Measuring Georgia’s Offense By the Numbers

As Michigan football prepares for the Georgia Bulldogs, much has been made about the Wolverines’ offense vs the Georgia defense. Yet, the matchup of Georgia’s offense vs the Michigan defense could be what ultimately decides this game.

The Georgia Bulldogs come into the Orange Bowl averaging an outstanding 39.2 points per game, good enough for the seventh-best average in the country.

However, the Bulldog offensive attack is perhaps the weakest unit in this entire game.

How can this be when they score so many points?

Let’s take a deep dive into what the Georgia offense has accomplished to this point, and why who they played while doing it matters.

For this exercise, we have taken game statistics from the five best total defenses that Georgia has played thus far — Alabama, Clemson, UAB, Kentucky, and South Carolina respectively.

Scoring Offense

In these five games, Georgia has put up 10, 24, 30, 40, and 56 points for an average of 32 points per game.

In the remaining seven games on their schedule, the Bulldogs averaged a whopping 50.3 points per game as they dominated the likes of Vanderbilt, Charleston Southern, Georgia Tech, a Florida defense that gave up 70 points to Samford, and others.

Now, Michigan football has also inflated its scoring numbers against its bottom seven defensive opponents where they averaged 44.4 points per game compared to just 35.8 points per game against their best five total defenses played this season.

That is still a large disparity, but nowhere near the size of Georgia’s.

All this is to say that Georgia has been able to put up a large volume of points this season, but they haven’t done so consistently against the top of their schedule.

In fact, the 10 points they scored against Clemson in Week 1 was mostly due to a pick-six in the second quarter.

The top two defenses Georgia has played are Alabama (8th) and Clemson (9th), and in those two games, it managed to score three offensive touchdowns and just 27 offensive points.

Conversely, the best two defenses Michigan football has played are Wisconsin (1st) and Iowa (15th) where Michigan scored 10 offensive touchdowns and 80 offensive points.

The Michigan defense comes into the Orange Bowl ranked 12th nationally in total defense while Georgia sits at 2nd.