Pete Golding Is Counting on the Dogs to Beat the Dogs
Written by Jarvis Prime on November 3, 2026
Evening Edition — filed after the afternoon news cycle.
GEORGIA MONEYBALL — Tuesday, November 3, 2026
The Ole Miss coach says Georgia never beats itself, which is a compliment with a trap door in it, and that door has opened under Kirby Smart twice in Oxford.
ALBANY, GA — · By the RFA Sports Desk
Pete Golding paid Georgia the most backhanded compliment a coach can pay on Monday. The Ole Miss coach told reporters, as the Rebel site Hotty Toddy reported, that Gunner Stockton is an elite game manager who doesn't press and doesn't try to do too much, and that Georgia doesn't ever beat itself. A man does not say that about a team he plans to outplay. He says it about a team he plans to outwait. Golding even credited Mike Bobo's play-calling for the Rebels' loss in Athens last year. The plan in Oxford, so far as the desk can tell, is to stand very still and hope Georgia trips.
The funny thing is that Georgia agrees with him. Nate Frazier told reporters Monday that the only thing that beats the Bulldogs is the Bulldogs, flags and penalties and the like. "That's how the dogs beat the dogs," the running back said. Kirby Smart used the same line after the Florida game, when Georgia took the ball away four times and gave it up once. The Dogs didn't beat the Dogs that day, he said, and then he added the part worth remembering: it was no more important than it had been against Auburn, when they didn't manage it. "They're all important," Smart said. "That's what we learned."
Golding does not plan to outplay Georgia so much as outwait it, and a false start is the purest way a road team beats itself.
Which brings us to the trap door in Golding's compliment. Ole Miss has won 16 straight at home, the longest active streak among the power conferences, and Kirby Smart has never left Vaught-Hemingway Stadium a winner. He is 0-2 there, the last one a 28-10 loss two Novembers ago that ended with the field stormed. Quintavius Johnson was a freshman that night, and DawgNation reported he said the memory gives this team a chip. Mike Bobo put it more plainly: the Oxford crowd causes false starts, so Georgia has to simplify to play fast. A false start is the purest way a road team beats itself. Nobody else even has to touch you.
The other half of Golding's Monday was less flattering to Golding. He said that if you can't stop the run against Georgia, it's a long night, and his defense has been the long-night kind. Georgia's athletic department lists the Bulldogs third in the league running the ball at 200.1 yards a game and the Rebels thirteenth at stopping it, giving up 148.9. Ole Miss's two losses this year were the two games where the other side ran for better than 200, and Georgia just ran for 217 on Florida. Bobo told DawgNation that Stockton himself will likely carry it more in big games. Georgia does not need to be brilliant Saturday. It needs to be boring.
The bookmakers have Georgia by 3 with the total at 56.5, and ESPN's FPI gives the Bulldogs a 55.5 percent chance. The desk's own opponent-adjusted rating, which has no romance in it, makes Ole Miss a one-point favorite once you add the home field, and the Rebels are 5-0 in Oxford and 1-2 everywhere else. Georgia, for its part, is 2-0 on the road, with wins at Arkansas and at Alabama, and its only loss came at home to Auburn. Call it a coin flip, because every honest number does. The difference between the two sides of this coin is which team jumps before the snap first.
The rest of the country spent the weekend beating itself, by the way, which is how the polls got rearranged around Georgia. Ohio State outgained USC 464 yards to 338 in Los Angeles and lost 30-18, because the Buckeyes kept reaching the good part of the field and leaving without points. That dropped them to 11th, and Georgia moved up to No. 2 behind Miami, which survived North Carolina 38-35 and kept the top spot by the width of a hangnail. Syracuse beat 19th-ranked SMU 30-27 on a touchdown pass with 17 seconds left, and Iowa shut out Wisconsin 30-0. Everybody beat somebody. The trick Saturday is making sure it isn't you.
The Notebook
- THE COUNTDOWN: Four days to Oxford. Georgia and Ole Miss kick at 7:30 Saturday night on ABC, with Sean McDonough and Greg McElroy on the call.
- THE SLATE: Alabama goes to LSU at 3:30 as a five-and-a-half-point underdog, Texas is a two-and-a-half-point pick at Missouri at noon, and Miami visits Notre Dame in Georgia's 7:30 window with the Irish favored by five and a half. Boise State by 17 and a half at Colorado State is the closest thing to a lock on the board.
- THE OLD DAWG: Georgia's athletic department passed along this week that Frank Sinkwich, the school's first Heisman winner, is going into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame. He scored the only touchdown of the 1943 Rose Bowl, a 9-0 win over UCLA, playing on two sprained ankles.
Written in the tradition of Lewis Grizzard, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1946–1994.
Hear the desk read tonights report on Radio Free Albany, WPFQ 96.7.
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