Georgia secondary looks to improve after ULM

It's not easy to find a gripe following a 51-14 blowout, but the Georgia secondary may have one.

"We gave up too many big plays as far as passing," sophomore cornerback Aaron Davis said after the game. "We had some missed tackles we need to clean up."

While Georgia did handle the Louisiana Monroe defense well for the most part, there were two drives in particular that showed some weakness in the Bulldogs secondary with its unorthodox version of the read-option offense.

In the final drive of the first half, Louisiana Monroe quarterback Garrett Smith engineered a drive in which he went 6-for-7 for 80 yards and put up the first points of the game for the Warhawks. He followed that drive with a 4-for-4, 67 yard drive to open the second half and bring the score within 21 points.

"They have what people call run-pass options where you're going to stick the ball in the belly of the back and if people react a certain way they'll pull it out and throw it to a receiver downfield. And if you play more coverage downfield they'll hand the ball off," coach Mark Richt said. "It's very effective, a lot of people do it. They kind of make a living off it. They did it and had a very high percentage of passes, some longer than others."

While most of Louisiana Monroe's passes were shorter screens to the outside, it succeeded on those two drives with medium and long passes in the middle of the field. Of Smith's 10 completions on that drive, five of them went for more than 15 yards including 22- and 29-yard touchdown passes.

After getting a chance to go back and watch the game, members of the secondary and the coaching staff agreed that defending the middle of the field is something the secondary is going to have to correct.

"That's just a mental error on our part and as a secondary we must improve on that," sophomore corner Malkom Parrish said.

Some might chalk it up to the inexperience of the secondary. The unit featured a true freshman and three sophomores among its five starters, with Rico McGraw and Parrish getting their first career starts.

However, Parrish wasn't accepting that as an excuse.

"That's not an excuse for any man," Parrish said. "We take the role as the secondary to prevent those (big plays) and we're going to go back and work on that."

Instead, what Parrish said the coaching staff reiterated to the group was focus and play level-headed.

"Just because the score says this don't mean we play to a different level," Parrish said. "I don't think we got a little careless, I think they just made a couple plays, where we had to bounce back. They have scholarship players, we have scholarship players. They're going to make a couple plays and we're going to make a couple plays. It's our job to prevent big plays."

While the struggles against a non-Power 5 team are disconcerting, the lesson couldn't have come at a better time for Georgia. With the rise of the read-option offense in college football, the Bulldogs are likely to see some variation of it against sooner rather than later, meaning that making these corrections will be vital to the success of the Georgia defense.

"I think it was good for us because just about everybody we play will have some of that but they won't go to it as much as Louisiana Monroe does," Richt said. "It was good practice for us and I think it was good for our defense."

This story was originally published September 7, 2015 at 10:29 PM with the headline "Georgia secondary looks to improve after ULM ."