With their SEC Championship win last Saturday over the Alabama Crimson Tide, the Georgia Bulldogs claimed their spot as the No. 3 seed in the 2025 College Football Playoffs.
The back-to-back conference champions will return to New Orleans for the New Year’s Day Allstate Sugar Bowl.
The Bulldogs (12-1) enter the CFP bracket with a first-round bye to kick off their 2025 playoff run in the quarterfinals, along with No. 1 Indiana, No. 2 Ohio State, and No. 4 Texas Tech.
Georgia will face the winner of the first-round matchup between No. 6 Ole Miss and No. 11 Tulane, to take place Dec. 20 at Oxford, Miss.
Both Ole Miss and Tulane will make their CFP debuts after already playing each other earlier this season, resulting in a 45-10 win for the Rebels.
Georgia also faced Ole Miss this season, defeating the Rebels in a 43-35 thriller on Oct. 18.
After nearly 10 years under its four-team semifinal selection system, this season marks only the second year for the College Football Playoff under the 12-team bracket. The Allstate Sugar Bowl will host a quarterfinal matchup for a second consecutive year, after providing a semifinal matchup during the 2014, 2017, 2020, and 2023 seasons.
In a Dec. 7 press conference, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart described the Sugar Bowl as an “incredible event” to compete in and said the matchup is about his players and their efforts throughout the season.
“This team and these players have done an incredible job of buying into what we’re pushing on them as coaches, things we’ve asked them to do differently than last year, and they’ve done all of those things,” Smart said. “I’m looking forward to this team going down there,the opportunity to play, whoever that opponent is, regardless of the circumstances of last year, with a lot of stuff going on outside of football.”
The Bulldogs’ 2024 appearance in the Allstate Sugar Bowl marked quarterback Gunner Stockton’s first career start on the roster. He is the only quarterback in the 2025 CFB playoff system to have started in a game from last year’s 12-team bracket. “In all the games [Stockton]played this year, he created value through those experiences, even the second half of the SEC championship,” Smart said. “He played against some huge atmospheres, and those were really good defenses, at Texas and Notre Dame, those two games, the game in the SEC championship, and the [2024] Sugar Bowl. So, they certainly created confidence for him.”
Georgia’s upcoming trip to New Orleans will mark the program’s 13th appearance in the Allstate Sugar Bowl. The Bulldogs have a 5-7 record in their previous Sugar Bowl matchups.
The winner of the 2025 Allstate Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1 at 8 p.m. will advance to the CFB semifinals’ VRBO Fiesta Bowl, one week later in Glendale, Ariz.
