When it became clear that Carson Beck would return to Athens and Jalen Milroe would return to Tuscaloosa, both veteran quarterbacks entered the 2024 season as Heisman Trophy favorites, albeit with very different prospects as NFL contenders.

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

Milroe is a uniquely dynamic weapon at the quarterback position, however, the dual-threat redshirt junior has attempted just 52 passes in his team's 3-0 start, and when forced into a passing situation on late downs, Milroe only has one Success rate of 17.5% rate. The problem for the defense he faced is that it's really difficult for Alabama to get into third-and-long.

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

But in a game where Georgia fell behind in the second half against Kentucky, Bobo ran the ball on early downs 63% of the time and posted an early down EPA/Play of 0.06. When Beck is allowed to throw early downs, Georgia has been largely conservative, increasing Beck's screen pass rate from 22% in 2023 to 24% in 2024, although Beck's yards per attempt on screens fell from 7.0 to 4.8.

Without Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey on Georgia's roster, the quarterback is arguably the team's best playmaker, but Beck is being treated like a game manager rather than the offensive lifter he can be.

Beck ranks 125th in average target depth at 7.7 and the offense has an explosive pass rate of 9.5%, which is the 55th percentile in the sport. On plays inside the structure or under 2.5 seconds, Beck's average target depth is just 2.5 yards, an alarmingly low number and a sign of an overly conservative coordinator who adamantly refuses to give his quarterback a chance to get the ball downfield to urge.

Carson Beck is one of the most accurate quarterbacks in college football and in his first year as a starter he ranked third in the country with 3,949 passing yards, the most of any returning player in the sport. Yet Bobo continued to operate as if he had an unproven asset at the forefront of his offense, and the result was a disappointing offense. The only bright spot is that Beck is showing how effective he can be when dealing with adversity.

So far, Georgia has averaged 7.42 yards on third downs, and remarkably, Beck is still averaging 0.761 EPA/play on third downs, which is 49th in the country. Despite his late-period heroics, the Dawgs only have a 42.9% late-period success rate. NFL scouts will be happy to recruit a quarterback who can perform under less-than-ideal circumstances, but that should never be the case at Georgia.

Beck will be the best quarterback on the field on Saturday, all talent evaluators agree, but there is no guarantee that he will be able to outperform his counterpart. The game script dictated a lot of early down runs in Alabama's blowout victories, so the aggressiveness doesn't shine there. However, on dropbacks in structure, Milroe has an ADOT of 6.3, almost four yards deeper than Beck, and despite being known as a big game hunter who plays with his legs out and holds on to the ball for too long, he makes 42.9% of his dropbacks from have fallen below that 2.5 second threshold, compared to 48.4% for Beck. Somehow, the run-first scrambler, always praised for his accuracy, manages to complete 80.8% of his in-structure throws, while Beck completes 79.5% despite only throwing screens half as often.

To put it more succinctly, Alabama's new head coach Kalen DeBoer and his offensive coordinator Nick Sheridan give their quarterback simple answers to throws in structure to keep him in front of the chains, thereby maximizing his accuracy on deep balls Aggressive downfield shots from the pocket, and it works.

The Tide's passing offense is explosive on 12.5% ​​of dropbacks, and while Milroe tends to take big hits on sacks, which results in him falling to 119th with 4.72 yards per dropback still in 13th place in EPA/dropback, five places ahead of Beck. Despite massive flaws in his game that have turned off the same NFL evaluators who are making Beck a first-rounder, Alabama has a more effective and efficient passing offense than Georgia.

Another one of these challenges is third-and-pass scenarios. That's why DeBoer and Sheridan make sure he's there rarely, 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 on the early ones. No one would dispute that Milroe is a more complete quarterback or more accurate passer than Beck, but the numbers say so, and that's detrimental to Georgia's play caller.

Bobo almost cost Georgia against Kentucky, and if he approached the Alabama game the same way, Kirby Smart would lose his first regular season football game since 2020.

Carson Beck will be the one NFL scouts from quarterback-needy teams will be writing postgame reports on, but with Bobo outnumbered by offensive forces on the opposing sideline, he may not be given the best chance to win the game. If that's the case, Smart will have to consider a move as his replacement for Todd Monken remains in the dark.