Looking at Carson Beck as Georgia football QB after three games and where he can improve
Carson Beck isn’t necessarily lighting up a stat sheet with eye-popping numbers so far this season but he’s given Georgia football for the most part what it is seeking from its starting quarterback.
He’s avoiding big mistakes and completing a high percentage of passes.
The No. 1 Bulldogs — after surviving another slow start against South Carolina — are 3-0 heading into Saturday’s game against UAB.
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Beck will go against the team he nearly made his starting debut against two years ago before a guy named Stetson Bennett had a better week of practice and jumped past Beck to get the nod when JT Daniels couldn't go due to an oblique injury.
Now Beck is the guy at a position that often gets the blame like when Georgia trailed South Carolina 14-3 at the half Saturday.
That necessitated Beck coming out of his typical cool-and-collected shell.
“I try to stay level one even keel for the most part, but sometimes there’s gotta be a guy to try to get the energy up and boost it,” he said.
Said wide receiver Dominic Lovett: “He was walking around the locker room to the offensive side, to the defensive side, telling everybody. We’ve got this. Keep your head up.”
Georgia rallied for a 24-14 victory, scoring touchdowns on its first two second-half possessions.
Beck’s final numbers: 27 of 35 for 269 yards.
He didn’t have a touchdown pass, but didn’t throw an interception.
Beck said one of those is more important.
“No interceptions,” he said. “Turnovers and explosive plays are the two most important things when it comes to winning a ballgame. Just take care of the ball. Once you get down in that red zone, we start running the ball, we punch it in, it doesn’t matter how we score, I’m just trying to get a win.”
Beck’s average depth of target against South Carolina was 5.7 yards, down from 7.9 against UT Martin and 7.2 against Ball State, according to Pro Football Focus. Beck used check downs Saturday rather than risky lower percentage throws downfield.
“He keeps us out of bad situations, which is what you ask your quarterback to do,” coach Kirby Smart said. “We put a lot on him. We put as much on him, as we put on Stetson. He handles that well. The guy's got really good command of our offense and understands it."
Bennett’s average depth of target was 9.4 last season and 6.9 against South Carolina.
“He did what he was supposed to do,” center Sedrick Van Pran-Granger said of Beck. “He made checks when needed and to be honest with you, he trusted the system. He was asked to just win the game on the ground and he bought into that.”
Beck is second in the SEC and 10th in the nation with a 74 percent completion percentage and ranks sixth in the SEC at yards per attempt at 8.81 and ninth in yards per completion at 11.92.
“What I’ve been most proud of is his composure, which I never doubted,” Smart said Monday. “He has a great demeanor about him that he handles positive and negative almost the same. As a matter of fact, there was a touchdown Saturday, I saw him celebrating for the first time. That’s really good when you see that emotion."
Bennett hit Rara Thomas for 36 yards over the middle, but had another deep ball to him broken up on a pass that was a tad underthrown.
“I missed a few throws, but that’s happens," he said. "It’s a part of football.”
Smart mentioned stepping up in the pocket is an area where Beck can work on to get better.
“He’s got to be willing to step up,” Smart said. “Like they talk about with racecar drivers, when the smoke’s there, you’ve got to go right through it. There’s a lot of smoke in there, especially when people pressure. You gotta be willing to step up and go through it and not always out and around it. You can’t always outrun it that way.”
Beck has six pass plays of 30 or more yards, tied for 27th nationally. That’s 2.0 per game. Bennett averaged 1.5 per game last season. Bennett averaged 4.3 pass plays of 20 or more yards last season. Beck averages 3.7.
“There’s shots on a lot of plays that the look’s not there," Smart said. "What he’s really good at, one of the best I’ve been around, at seeing the coverage and knowing what it is and knowing where to go with the ball.”
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Energized Carson Beck rallied Georgia football. A look at QB so far.
