Georgia's Expectations with Zamir White Announcing his Return
Typically, a good indicator of whether a team will succeed the following season is the number of players have returning on both sides of the ball. Georgia is losing some very valuable players early to the draft this year such as Azeez Ojulari, Tyson Campbell, Trey Hill and Eric Stokes, but they have also had quite a few players announce they will be returning. And they just gained another key contributor in starting running back Zamir White, as he announced he will be returning for one more season.
White now joins offensive players such as JT Daniels, Jordan Davis, Kearis Jackson and James Cook who have announced they are returning for the 2021 season. Most impiortant, they all said the same thing: they have to take care of some unfinished business.
With Georgia having a good core of its talent on offense coming back and some valuable players on defense returning, the expectations for the upcoming season should be very high.
The mindset in Athens seems to be "title or nothing." Kirby Smart is about to enter his sixth season as the program's head coach and things have aligned for the Bulldogs to make another run at the title. All of the excuses like "Georgia doesn't have the offense yet," or "they haven't found a good OC yet" and "they are still searching for a legit quarterback" are no longer valid.
The question that now arises with White's return is what the running back room is going to look like. Georgia is loaded at the position every year, but they might be the deepest they have ever been in regards to the number of guys that Smart and offensive coordinator Todd Monken trust carrying the rock.
There were multiple games this year where five different guys were getting carries and now they are about to add another in the mix with Lovasea Carroll, who has already enrolled in school. There are a lot of mouths that Monken is going to have to feed, but one of his strengths in the past has been finding new ways to get his running backs the ball.
One way is obviously in the run game, but Monken also does a great job at utilizing the passing game as an extension of the run game with angle routes, screens and straight go routes on some occasions. It will be difficult to get everyone touches every game, but one thing is for sure: They won't have any issue with not having enough running backs to use in the offense.
White will more than likely be the primary ball-carrier, but there will be a lot of rotating at the position next season, and with running backs time in the NFL getting shorter and shorter, keeping them fresh in college is music to their ears.
This situation might feel very familiar to Georgia fans and it definitely should. In 2017, when Georgia last made the title game, they had a large number of players return for their senior years as opposed to declaring for the draft.
All of those returnees played a huge role in the Bulldogs' success that year and it allowed them to have a legit shot at bringing home a national championship. The 2021 season is off to a great start so far for Smart and his team, and from the looks of things, the expectations for what's in store this year is nothing short of hoisting up the College Football Playoff trophy. They appear to have found all of the missing pieces to their puzzle, so it is now just a matter of if they can put it all together.
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