ATHENS – The last time Georgia lost a game, the Bulldogs responded by taking the skin off Florida State’s bones, 63-3, and the ‘Noles still haven’t recovered. So it was reasonable to expect Georgia to pound Auburn into a blue-orange paste, and judging by the scoreboard — Georgia 31, Auburn 13 — that’s pretty much what happened.

But Auburn didn’t get its reputation as the Great Destroyer of college football by turning around and playing the victim. The Tigers did just enough Saturday — especially with a third-quarter touchdown drive that sent a ripple of excitement through the crowd — to keep Georgia involved, even as the Bulldogs hung on the overmatched Auburn defense for touchdown after touchdown.

Auburn played its cleanest game of the 2024 season, but “clean” alone is not nearly enough against the locomotive that is Georgia.

There were murmurs in tailgates across campus and in bars and restaurants in Athens, the dreaded words “fall game” making the rounds amid concerns about Georgia’s tendency to start slowly and questions about Carson Beck’s consistency . This was exactly the kind of game the Bulldogs rightly feared, the latest installment of the Deep South’s oldest rivalry, with an unstable, unpredictable opponent just a few plays away from being 5-0.

As it turned out, the trap was set a few hours to the northwest in Nashville, with Vanderbilt giving Alabama all it could handle. Cheers rang through Sanford Stadium every time Vanderbilt scored, as Dawg fans followed the game on their phones and watched replays during intermissions.

As has become tradition in 2024, Georgia started slowly, with an early touchdown, but meandered through much of the rest of the first half. Auburn couldn’t take advantage, scoring just a handful of chunk plays in the first half and a single field goal in the first quarter.

Auburn’s key early mistake came late in the half. Stuck against their own end zone, trailing 7-3 with 1:52 remaining, the Tigers didn’t use nearly enough clock. A reckless deep ball on second down stopped the clock, and Auburn gave the ball back to Georgia with 1:02 left in the half. Georgia needed just five plays and 45 seconds to thunder into the end zone and take a 14-3 lead that would last until halftime.

The Tigers showed a spark of life in the second half, with QB Payton Thorne engineering a six-play, 68-yard touchdown drive that pulled Auburn within four points of Georgia’s lead, 14-10, with 9:45 to go in the third. For a moment, Sanford Stadium became uneasy, all those silent fears broadcast during the pregame starting to gain a little momentum.

Beck led Georgia on two consecutive touchdown drives to effectively put the game away, but some of the same questions that arose during the Alabama game remained unanswered against Auburn. Georgia still struggled to seal the edges against Auburn’s run game, and Beck struggled with mobility despite Auburn’s pressure. Those weren’t game-breaking weaknesses against Auburn, but against the behemoths looming on Georgia’s schedule, they could prove problematic.

Auburn, meanwhile, falls to 2-4, 0-3 in the SEC, and while the record is nothing to admire, the Athens effort was at least free of the errors that have characterized the Tigers’ early season. The all-time series now stands at 65–56–8 in Georgia’s favor, and Auburn will have to wait another year to close that gap.