Georgia football’s fall from grace in a post-NIL era: Debunking a long-standing narrative

If you surround yourself with college football and make it part of your livelihood, you will undoubtedly hear and read every story under the sun regarding the world’s greatest sport.

Most don’t even deserve a second look and are baseless conspiracy theories, but a few exist in that creepy realm between fact and fiction.

One that has caught my attention comes from the perpetrators of the “SEC is washed” crowd, more specifically those who are denouncing the program that has ruled the conference for the first half of this decade: the Georgia Bulldogs.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen fans on social media and even college football talking the story that the Dawgs have lost their edge since “paying players became legal.”

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Georgia head coach Kirby Smart and his team celebrate after winning the Southeastern Conference Championship Game against Alabama in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Ignoring the fact that every power program always paid players (do you really think USC in the mid-2000s or the Urban Meyer-led Buckeyes got five stars for coming to their school pro bono?), let’s look at why this is a boring and hackneyed refrain for a topic that requires a little more nuance.

We can start with some dates, as the arrival of ‘paying players’, or NIL, came into effect on July 1, 2021.

If NIL had any impact on Georgia’s ability to compete at the highest level, it certainly wasn’t immediate, as the Dawgs completed back-to-back national championships in 2021 and ’22.

Even the next year in 2023, Georgia went nearly wire-to-wire as the No. 1 team for the entire regular season, missing the College Football Playoff after a narrow loss to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game.

They were arguably the best team that season, fouling just once against the aforementioned Crimson Tide squad, and shutting down a very talented Florida State team in the Orange Bowl to finish 13-1.

Jalon Walker and Malaki Starks of the Georgia Bulldogs celebrate a defensive stop during a game against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets at Sanford Stadium in Athens, Georgia, on November 29, 2024.

While it’s true that the 2024 team wasn’t a vintage Kirby Smart outfit, they still won 11 games, an SEC championship and four victories against Playoff opponents, including a 34-3 drubbing of ACC champion Clemson.

Even the 2025 team was a return to form for the Athens boys, going 12-2 and winning the conference again, but losing a close game to Ole Miss in the quarterfinals.

So if a 65-7 record with two national titles and three SEC championships is considered a “waste,” then please sign me up for that every day of the week and twice on Saturdays.

But the evidence doesn’t just come from the field either.

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Talent acquisition is the biggest indicator of how healthy a program is in any era of college football, and the numbers would indicate that the Bulldogs are far from “broke.”

Starting with the 2022 recruiting cycle, which would take place immediately following the introduction of NIL, the Dawgs have had some serious wins on the recruiting trail.

Their class rankings, according to 247Sports’ composite rankings, were third (2022), second (’23), first (’24), second (’25) and sixth (’26).

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You could say they found a few nickels to rub together over those years.

Many will point to this year’s class as an example of Georgia’s inability to recruit now that “the playing field has been leveled” given their current rank of 30, but that’s just unfair.

The Bulldogs have signed just eight players this current cycle, and two of those eight are composite five-stars.

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When that number of commits reaches the 20-plus mark, I fully expect Georgia to be in the top five again.

Georgia head coach Kirby Smart yells at his players during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee, on September 13, 2025. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Yes, Georgia hasn’t won every game they’ve played in, but that doesn’t mean they’re “washed,” and it doesn’t have much to do with NIL.

The transfer portal may have had a little to do with it, as teams can no longer stack five-stars and expect them to wait their turn on the bench, but Georgia is still one of the most talented teams in the country year in and year out.

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Trying to beat them because they haven’t won a national championship in three years is also ridiculous, because they’ve been competitive every year, and in a twelve-game tournament, you’re going to get some shaky results in any given game or two, especially when you’re drawing from such a small sample size.

Aside from the lackluster performance against Notre Dame in the 2024-25 playoffs, their only other data point from the 12-team era is a last-minute back-and-forth loss to Ole Miss, a team they had beaten just two months earlier.

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Georgia is doing well. They’ll be fine.

As much as it pains me to say that as a Florida Gator fan I have to throw balls and strikes and had no desire to sit back and watch a false story spread like wildfire.

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Trust me, if Georgia ever falls off a cliff, I’ll be the first to point and laugh, but today isn’t that day, and tomorrow doesn’t look too promising either.

Excuse me while writing this makes me throw up.