Once it became clear that Carson Beck was returning to Athens and Jalen Milroe to Tuscaloosa, both veteran quarterbacks entered the 2024 season as favorites for the Heisman Trophy, but with very different prospects as NFL prospects.

Beck returned as the clear top quarterback in the 2025 NFL Draft, while questions remained about how Milroe would develop his game under new head coach Kalen DeBoer to become a more polished passer. Now the two meet for a rematch of their SEC Championship bout from last year in a top-five SEC showdown as No. 4 Alabama hosts No. 2 Georgia in Week 5.

Milroe is a uniquely dynamic weapon at the quarterback position, but the dual-threat redshirt junior has attempted just 52 passes during his team’s 3-0 start, and when forced into a passing situation on late downs, Milroe has only 17.5% success rate. The problem for the defenses he has faced, Alabama is really tough to get on third and long.

Neither Georgia nor Alabama have been particularly effective at running the ball this season. Bobo’s offense, which added Florida’s Trevor Etienne this season and would be lost without him, ranked 92nd in rushing success rate at 39.2%, while Alabama ranks 73rd at 41.0%.

But in a game where Georgia entered the second half against Kentucky, Bobo ran the ball 63% of the time on early downs and generated an EPA/play on early downs of 0.06. When Beck is allowed to commit early downs, Georgia has been largely conservative, with Beck’s screen passing rate increasing from 22% in 2023 to 24% in 2024, despite Beck’s yards per attempt on screens dropping from 7.0 to 4.8.

Without Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey on Georgia’s roster, the quarterback may be the team’s best playmaker, yet Beck is treated like a game manager instead of the offensive elevator he can be.

Beck ranks 125th in average depth of target at 7.7 and the offense has an explosive 9.5% success rate, which is the 55th percentile in the sport. When playing within the structure, or under 2.5 seconds, Beck’s average target depth is only 2.5 yards, an alarmingly low number and a sign of an overly conservative coordinator who outright refuses to give his quarterback a chance to get the ball to push into the field.

Carson Beck is one of the most accurate quarterbacks in college football and in his first year as a starter, he finished third in the nation with 3,949 passing yards, the most of any returning player in the sport. Yet Bobo continues to operate as if he has an unproven asset guiding his offense, and the result is a disappointing offense. The only positive is that Beck shows how effective he can be in the face of adversity.

To this point, Georgia has faced an average third-down distance of 7.42 yards, and remarkably, Beck is still producing 0.761 EPA/play on third downs, which is 49th best in the country. Despite his late heroics, the Dawgs only have a late success rate of 42.9%. NFL scouts will love to draft a quarterback who can function in less than ideal circumstances, but the circumstance should never be that way at Georgia.

Beck will be the best quarterback on the field Saturday, every talent evaluator will agree, but there’s no guarantee he’ll be able to outshine his counterpart. The game script has dictated a lot of early down runs in the big Alabama wins, so the aggressiveness isn’t on display there. However, on dropbacks in structure, Milroe has an ADOT of 6.3, almost four meters deeper than Beck, and although he is known as a big game hunter who plays with his legs and holds the ball too long, standing at 42, 9% of his dropbacks have fallen within that 2.5-second threshold, compared to 48.4% for Beck. Somehow the run-first scrambler, constantly beaten for his accuracy, completes 80.8% of his throws into the structure, compared to Beck’s 79.5% even while throwing screens about half as often.

To put it more succinctly, Alabama’s new head coach, Kalen DeBoer, and his offensive coordinator, Nick Sheridan, are giving their quarterback easy answers on in-structure throws to keep him ahead of the chains. They maximize his deep ball accuracy with aggressive downfield shots from the pocket, and it’s working.

The Tide’s passing attack generates explosion on 12.5% ​​of dropbacks, and despite Milroe’s tendency to take huge losses on sacks, dropping him to 119th in yards per dropback at 4.72, he still ranks 13th in EPA/dropback, five places ahead of Wenk. Even with huge flaws in his game that have turned off the same NFL evaluators who will make Beck a first-rounder, Alabama has a more effective and efficient passing offense than Georgia.

Another one of those struggles is the third-and-pass scenarios, so DeBoer and Sheridan make sure he’s rarely there because the easiest way to protect your quarterback on late downs, especially if you don’t have an elite run game, is to trust him. the early. No one will dispute that Milroe is a more complete quarterback or more accurate passer than Beck, but the numbers say so and it’s damning for Georgia’s play-caller.

Bobo nearly cost Georgia against Kentucky, and if he calls the game against Alabama the same way, Kirby Smart will lose his first regular-season football game since 2020.

Carson Beck will be the one that NFL scouts from quarterback-needy teams will write post-game reports on, but because of how outmatched Bobo is by the offensive staff on the opposing sideline, he may not get the best chance to win it game. If that’s the case, Smart will have to consider a change as his replacement for Todd Monken is stuck in the dark ages.