Most of the new college football world we find ourselves in was on full display Saturday night in Athens.

SEC heavyweights Tennessee and Georgia played each other for 60 minutes in the brightly lit madhouse that was Sanford Stadium.

A lot of drama and a lot of great plays on both sides of the football were made by a lot of NFL talent.

Millions of eyeballs across the country were glued to the events, and with each piece it felt like the fallout surrounding it was off the charts.

Despite all that, at the end of the evening, after the insane asylum emptied into the cool gloom of Georgia, very little was actually decided.

Welcome to the new world.

The scoreboard glowed like this: No. 12 Georgia 31, No. 7 Tennessee 17. But with a dozen College Football Playoff spots on the horizon — not to mention spots in the Southeastern Conference championship game — neither the Bulldogs, nor the Volunteers want anything for themselves… other than a chance to play another week of meaningful football.

That’s because both Georgia and Tennessee now have two losses. And from what little we’ve actually been able to determine amid the histrionic talking heads and insurance company-sponsored “Playoff Predictor” nonsense, both teams are still theoretically in contention for both the SEC crown and a place to play for the large enchilada.

Don’t make it too twisted. Saturday was a huge win for Georgia and proved that coach Kirby Smart had picked up another trait from mentor Nick Saban: he simply doesn’t lose after losing. Instead, the Dawgs stood up, put on their hobnail boots and broke some Tennessee noses, much to the delight of the faithful.

Georgia had the most to give away on Saturday night, having already lost to Alabama and Ole Miss in what was already a silly SEC season. That meant the Dawgs had no wiggle room to stumble again, despite a third conference game against a top-10 team.

Tennessee, meanwhile, was ahead by a nose thanks to just one loss to Athens — a 19-14 setback against Arkansas on Oct. 6 — and boasted a crushing win against the Crimson Tide that Georgia couldn’t pull off.

But now? Good luck figuring out where Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama or hell anyone outside of Oregon (which nearly lost to Wisconsin but remained undefeated) will land in this week’s Playoff rankings.

Not that Saturday was entirely unproductive. Aside from the fact that Georgia apparently boosted its fireworks budget to keep up with the corn-in-a-jar enthusiasts up north, the Dawgs’ victory was a referendum on the quarterback talent that is Carson Beck.

Beck was considered a Heisman candidate early on and still a first-round prospect in the NFL Draft, but started to falter a bit as Georgia bounced up and down in the national polls. On Saturday, though, Beck was very strong, going 25 of 40 for 347 yards, throwing two TD passes to under-targeted tight end Oscar Delp and rushing for another score.

Not that his Volunteer counterpart, freshman Nico Iamaleava, was slow by any means. Just a week after battling what Tennessee called “concussion-like symptoms” against Mississippi State, Iamaleava didn’t even get to play against Georgia until Saturday — but he answered the bell with 167 passing yards and not a ton of mistakes .

Smart, a coach who hadn’t lost an SEC regular-season game in 42 games before Alabama rolled back the Dawgs 41-34, also faced a hint of an existential crisis against Tennessee. Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss Rebels exposed Georgia’s weaknesses once again a week earlier in Oxford. Every decision Smart considered Saturday night had consequences.

A single wrong move by Georgia would mean irrelevance for the remainder of 2024, and likely another round of opt-out waivers, similar to what the Bulldogs saw after missing the four-team Playoff race last season.

Despite operating without a safety net, Smart and the Dawgs pressed all the right buttons to win their 8th straight game against Tennessee and improve to 8-1 against the Vols while Smart patrolled the hedges. It certainly helped that Athens After Dark was electric, a nonstop thumping roar that tested Tennessee’s eardrums and forced offensive linemen to make a few early twitches in key situations.

Georgia’s coup came to an end Saturday, just as Smart had hoped all week, believing the stronger team would win in the fourth quarter. First, the Dawgs’ defense forced Tennessee to fall behind 24-17 with 8:47 to play. Beck and Georgia took over at their own 8 and calmly marched 92 grueling yards over an equally grueling 6:21 – with the icing on the cake being a Nate Frazier 2-yard touchdown plunge.

That gave Georgia its 29th straight home victory, a win in which Tennessee recorded just eight first downs and failed to score in the final 30 minutes.

In the end, unfortunately, Saturday night wasn’t much different than Friday night’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight: a truckload of pomp and circumstance, a clear winner and a clear loser, but there are still questions about what was accomplished.

Both Georgia and Tennessee are still battling for 1 of 12 Playoff Golden Tickets with 2 regular season games remaining – with Georgia’s resume seemingly improving on all scorecards. That said, a world-class statistician, armed with algorithms and fancy graphs, still can’t possibly predict what will happen — either with the Bulldogs, the Volunteers or the 40 or so other teams that could make a case for a Playoff spot .

Welcome to the new world.