Kirby Smart's defense was never that strong against the spread while at Bama. I believe that is the reason AU was able to expose Georgia on Saturday. With Pruitt calling the plays in 2 weeks, Bama should be a lot stronger shutting down their offense.
Really?
I may be not recalling correctly here, but I'm pretty sure Auburn and Florida both ran the spread in 2009, and Smart beat both teams in back to back weeks.
UGA loses a game and all of a sudden the narrative shifts to "well, he was never that good in the first place and X was always his vulnerability."
Georgia had a whopping 230 TOTAL YARDS on offense.
That has nothing at all to do with Smart's defense.
Georgia made stupid penalties. Georgia was 3 of 14 on third down. Georgia had a turnover, Auburn didn't. And Kerryon Johnson ran over, through, and around the Dawg defense, too.
In 2009, Florida only rushed for 88 yards (although they had over 300 yards total offense in what was basically a blowout loss).
Auburn won - once again - because they did what teams that win games usually do: they ran the ball (237 yards - Auburn had more rushing yards than UGA had total yards), they stopped the run (46 yards rushing for UGA), and they won the turnover battle (1-0).
Those three things right there will win 98% of football games unless your team gets flagged for substantially more penalty yardage than the opponent.
Look, Auburn was clearly better than UGA on Saturday. Both teams made mistakes early - Auburn overcame theirs and UGA didn't.
But let's not start pushing the "Kirby was never good against X" narrative because at this point that's as ridiculous as the "UGA is number one because they beat a good Notre Dame" narrative.