Even after transferring out of the SEC West last season, longtime Auburn Tiger and now Oregon Ducks’ quarterback Bo Nix would have to face his foe from the East once again: the Georgia defense.
In last Saturday’s game against the No. 3 ranked Bulldogs, Nix was 21-for-37 passing with 173 yards, including two interceptions on back-to-back drives in the first half on the way to a 49-3 Duck demolition.
After the game, Nix acknowledged that it was the same Kirby Smart defense that he’s struggled to move the ball against for the past three years.
“It was the same Georgia. I’ve seen a lot of those looks. They’re just really good,” Nix said to the media. “Really good at the point of attack. Really good [at] playing the ball. Really good at tackling. It’s just tough to move the ball on those guys.”
In the four games he’s played Georgia, Nix has thrown only one touchdown out of 165 attempts, and the lone score came during his freshman year at Auburn when he went 30-for-50 with 245 yards.
To the senior’s credit, he was more elusive than in prior games and wasn’t sacked once. In the three contests he played against the Bulldogs from 2019-21, Nix was brought down behind the line nine times.
Smart recognized how hard it was to get to the quarterback given the quickness in which the ball was out of the hands of Nix and into the hands of other playmakers.
“It’s hard to sack Bo Nix. It’s hard. He’s smart. He knows where to go with the ball… We had some pressures called, and it doesn’t matter if you throw the ball in 2.1 seconds, and they screened us a lot, so you’re not going to get many sacks in that,” Smart said after the game. “We’ve got good rushers. We’ve got guys that will be productive, but we knew going into the game he’s hard to get on the ground.”
Even though he added 37 yards rushing on 8 attempts, Nix’s two interceptions early in the game gave the Bulldogs all the momentum they needed heading into the locker room at halftime.
The first turnover came on a great play from true freshman Malaki Starks. Nix took a shot deep to the left side of the field with 3:32 left in the first quarter, but Starks stayed step-for-step with the Ducks’ receiver, high-pointed the ball and gave the Bulldogs possession on their own 8-yard line after going up 7-0 on the previous drive.
That resulted in a Bulldogs touchdown on the first play of the second quarter.
A couple minutes later on the very next Oregon possession, Christopher Smith made an excellent read on Nix’s pass and intercepted the ball, returning it to the Georgia 44-yard line.
After the game, Smith told the media that they take pride in keeping opponents out of their end zone, and attributed a lot of the returning success to Smart and the coaching staff.
“One of our mottos is ‘no one in our end zone,’ and we definitely pride ourselves on that, even up until all zeroes hit on the clock. Two’s and three’s were able to get in and get some good experience, but like you said, we wanted to hold the standard, and they did a great job of that: Bend but don’t break,” Smith said.
“I think it just shows how hard we work and how good a job the coaches do with us. [There] was a lot of talk about us being complacent, and we were real big on not being complacent.”
The Bulldogs’ defense has held opposing offenses to less than 10 points per game in nine of their last 13 regular season games, and the strength in the secondary will make it hard for teams to move the ball against this team for another year in a row.