The Georgia Bulldogs and Clemson Tigers have a lot of similarities under head coaches Kirby Smart and Dabo Swinney. Both coaches have won a pair of national championships.
For Clemson, the Tigers won national championships in 2016 and 2018. Since then, the Tigers lost in the 2019 national championship and after 2020’s College Football Playoff elimination, Clemson has not been a national championship contender. Yes, the Tigers made the 2024 playoff and recently won the ACC in 2020, 2022 and 2024, but things have not been the same for Clemson.
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Swinney has drawn criticism for failing to adapt to the changing landscape of college football. The Tigers are notably against using the transfer portal and don’t have the most robust name, image and likeness (NIL) fund.
Clemson was supposed to change the narrative with their 2025 team, but a 1-3 start derailed a year where the Tigers entered the season with high expectations. Clemson finished the year just 7-6 and appears to be positioned to be an afterthought in the national championship race for the near future.
Georgia coach Kirby Smart and Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney speak before the start of the Aflac Kickoff Game in 2024.
Over the last five seasons (2021-2025), the losses have begun to mount for Clemson. The Tigers have 20 losses over the past five seasons after having just 18 losses in the previous decade (2011-2020).
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Some fans have even called for Clemson to fire Swinney. The Tigers just haven’t had the momentum as they did during the Trevor Lawrence and Deshaun Watson era.
Could Georgia be headed down a similar path to Clemson? The Bulldogs and Tigers both don’t use the transfer portal a ton. In fact, only three Power Four schools (Miami, Stanford and USC) have less transfer commitments than Georgia and Clemson, who both have nine transfers.
Georgia won a pair of national championships in 2021 and 2022. The Bulldogs have more losses (five) over the past two seasons (2024-2025) than Georgia did over the previous four (2020-2023).
Still, Georgia has won back-to-back SEC championships and has been a top-four seed in the College Football Playoff in consecutive seasons. Georgia’s frustrating exits in the quarterfinals of the playoff show the Bulldogs aren’t the powerhouse they were during their back-to-back national title runs, which came during the first two year of the NIL era.
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Georgia, much like Clemson, is no longer accumulating talent at the clip it used to. The Bulldogs have just the No. 10 overall recruiting class in the country (combines the incoming recruiting and transfer class). Georgia has not fallen off in terms of talent acquisition as much as Clemson, who has the No. 24 overall class. Kirby Smart remains an elite recruiter, but the days of stockpiling top players are over, especially if you aren’t willing to pay up.
Georgia’s program has not fallen from the elite tier of college football, but as Clemson’s erosion showed us, it is hard to trend up when you’ve won as many games as Georgia has. Eventually you have to come back down to earth, which is why Nick Saban’s consistency at Alabama was so impressive. However, we’re in a new era of college football where teams change so much year after year that it is hard to maintain that level of roster talent and on-field consistency. The margins of college football are finer than ever and for better or worse there’s more parity in the sport.
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This article originally appeared on UGA Wire: Could Georgia football become the next Clemson?
