Time continues to drift away as kickoff between the No. 16 Ole Miss Rebels and No. 3 Georgia Bulldogs draws closer.

The Rebels (7-2, 3-2 SEC) need an upset win on Saturday to remain in the hunt for a College Football Playoff berth while the Bulldogs (7-1, 5-1 SEC) are trying to stay in position for a first-round bye in the CFP. Both of these teams are talented, despite some slip ups earlier in the season, but what do the numbers say about Ole Miss and Georgia?

Let’s look at some of the key stats below.

READ MORE: How To Watch, Betting Odds: Ole Miss Football vs. Georgia Bulldogs

PASSING GAME

Ole Miss: 377.11 YPG, 23 TDs, 3 INTs, Sacked 19 times

Georgia: 299 YPG, 17 TDs, 11 INTs, Sacked 10 times

The two quarterbacks in this game (Ole Miss’ Jaxson Dart and Georgia’s Carson Beck) bring some expertise to the table in their respective offenses, but you can tell by the numbers that the Rebels have relied more on the air attack than the Bulldogs so far this season. Even so, Dart’s three interceptions are a much better number than Beck’s 11 in 2024, and taking care of the ball will be a storyline to watch on Saturday.

Where Georgia does have the numbers advantage, however, is in pass protection. Dart has been sacked nine more times than Beck so far this year, and if Ole Miss wants to have a shot to pull off the upset, it will need to keep its quarterback upright this weekend.

RUSHING GAME

Ole Miss: 178.3 YPG, 4.7 YPC, 24 TDs

Georgia: 132.3 YPG, 4.5 YPC, 15 TDs

This could come as a surprise to some, but from a pure numbers perspective, Ole Miss’ rushing attack has been slightly better than Georgia’s this year. Some of the Rebels’ biggest issues on the ground, however, have come in conference play, so this year-long look doesn’t exactly tell the whole story.

It certainly doesn’t paint a full picture of the current state of Ole Miss’ running back room. Henry Parrish Jr. is sidelined with an injury he sustained late in the first half last week against Arkansas, and the Rebels continue to look for a consistent answer in the backfield, something that will be critical against Georgia this weekend.

DEFENSE

Ole Miss: 82.2 rushing yards per game (2.3 per attempt), 41 sacks (256 yards)

Georgia: 108.1 rushing yards per game (3.3 per attempt), 20 sacks (167 yards)

I wanted to highlight these two defensive stats in particular because I think they will play a large role in telling the final story of this game. Both Ole Miss and Georgia boast some talented defensive fronts, ones that have smothered opposing rushing attacks and gotten to the quarterback throughout the year.

Establishing a consistent run game will be critical for both teams as will keeping the quarterback safe on pass plays. If these defenses can cause the offenses to be one-dimensional, we could be in for a low-scoring afternoon in Oxford. Watching these front sevens work will be one of the main storylines in Saturday’s game.

Looking at the polls from the key battleground state of Georgia in the months before the US election, it should perhaps be no surprise that Donald Trump prevailed in the Peach State. His lead over Kamala Harris was small but persistent from August onwards.

Why, then, does it feel like a shock here in the state capital, Atlanta, where I was based for the week of the election? The city is heavily Democratic, even in the affluent suburbs, and is teeming with signs reading: “Harris, obviously.” When Harris visited the city the weekend before polling day, the crowd was packed in and energised, anticipating a win for America’s first female president.

Enclaves like Atlanta are a familiar sight on the electoral maps of the US, and they tell a story of the Democratic party’s struggle to make inroads with white, working class and rural America. Joe Biden’s victory in the state in 2020 now looks like an anomaly that the Democrats were hoping was the start of a trend.

Indeed, it may well be that the pandemic muddied the waters of electoral trends in the US, because in 2024 Trump made gains in almost every demographic in Georgia compared with his performance in 2020. This includes among black women and people with college degrees, two groups that are now solidly Democrat throughout the US.

Just as important are the gains Trump made within his own base. Small but significant increases in voter turnout appear to have broken for Trump. This may be partly due to a narrative flip from 2020, when Trump’s campaign urged people to vote in person and (wrongfully) not to trust mail-in ballots, believing the system favoured Democrats.

This time, however, Republican voters were strongly encouraged to vote early using that same system. A record 4 million early votes were cast in Georgia, which was initially taken to be a good sign for Harris, but looks to have been (at least in part) a reflection of the new Republican strategy.

Georgia had been braced for trouble. In 2020, the state was at the heart of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election. In a now infamous phone call on January 2 2021, Trump lobbied Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to overturn Biden’s victory in the state and secure the presidency. Raffensperger’s refusal to comply led to death threats.

The threat of violence did not dissipate as the election approached in 2024. Election officials in the state were issued with panic buttons and protected by armed security guards in preparation for disorder at vote counts.

Read more:
US election: officials are issued with panic buttons as attacks on ballot boxes continue

And on election day itself, several polling locations had to be evacuated due to hoax bomb threats that the FBI believes originated in Russia. But, in any event, voting passed peacefully and the result was less of a knife-edge than had been predicted. The reasons for this are embedded in Georgia’s difficult history.

Georgia’s long shadow

Georgia has long played a pivotal role in US presidential elections and political movements. Democratic candidates champion the state’s history as the cradle of the civil rights movement, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr, and the home of civil rights icon John Lewis. But this sits in an uneasy coexistence with Georgia’s history at the heart of the American civil war.

After solid Democrat rule stretching from the end of the civil war in 1865 to the 1960s, the state pivoted to the Republican party after discontent with the Voting Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in the US by prohibiting discrimination based on race, sex, religion or national origin.

That resentment was exploited by the so-called “southern strategy”: the playbook Richard Nixon used that same decade to increase support for the Republican party among white voters by stirring racial divisions and campaigning against federal welfare programmes.

But the past 20 years have seen a slow shift back towards the Democrats. Georgia’s growing and diversifying population, especially in urban and suburban areas like Atlanta, has reshaped its political landscape.

The 2020 census revealed the state’s significant ethnic minority populations have increased. Almost one-third of its citizens are African American, and a further 10% are Hispanic or Latino. White, non-Hispanic Georgians now make up just over half the population – the lowest this figure has ever been.

Racial divides are played out geographically, with diverse urban districts far removed from Georgia’s overwhelmingly white rural population. Those geographic divides are partly due to aggressive gerrymandering within the state that has reduced competitiveness in a majority of districts and diminished the power of minority votes.

A federal court ruling in 2023 stated that “Georgia has not reached the point where the political process has equal openness and equal opportunity for everyone.” Indeed, in the wake of the 2020 election and in direct response to Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, the Republican-dominated Georgia state legislature took the opportunity to pass Senate Bill 202.

This is a set of voting restrictions that Biden referred to as “Jim Crow in the 21st century” for its disproportionate impact on black and ethnic minority voters in the state. It was a nod to the white supremacist laws in place across many southern states and some cities in the north from the 1880s to the 1960s that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement. One Democratic state representative I interviewed for my research in 2023 called the bill “codified racial animus”.

For now, analysis and introspection will follow. But it is clear that even as Georgia positions itself for a changing future, the state still carries the ghosts of its past.