At this point, let’s accept that the 2024 version of Carson Beck makes mistakes.

The Georgia quarterback has not lived up to preseason All-America hype, and the chatter for him to be the No. 1 pick in the 2025 NFL Draft has cooled off. For the Dawgs, those things are somewhat irrelevant in the bigger picture. More urgent is whether the mistake-prone Beck can lead UGA to its third national title in 4 years.

To be clear, there’s no version of UGA winning a title that includes Beck throwing 3 interceptions per game. Yes, UGA won in consecutive weeks when that happened (SEC Final had the stat that Beck was the 4th FBS quarterback in the past 20 years to accomplish that semi-dubious feat). For all we know, Beck will throw 3 interceptions again on Saturday against an elite Ole Miss defense in Oxford and Georgia will still find a way to prevail. It wouldn’t be a shock to the system if that happened, especially against an Ole Miss defense that’s lived in the backfield this year (Pete Golding’s unit has 17 more tackles for loss than anyone in America).

But a question looms large: How mistake-prone can Beck be while leading UGA to a national title?

Let me explain. This is different than wondering how many beers you can have on Saturday night while knowing that you’ve got brunch with the in-laws on Sunday. That’s a pass/fail situation. Nothing about winning a championship is “pass/fail,” especially in the new 12-team Playoff, which will require teams to win 3 or 4 games against top-12 teams en route to a title.

That context is worth remembering with today’s exercise because obviously, we don’t have precedent with the 12-team Playoff. There’s more grace than ever for Saturday night beers. Er, regular-season interceptions.

But in case you were wondering, here are the interceptions/pass totals for the winning national championship quarterbacks in the Playoff era (I did that because it was the best way to account for guys like Cardale Jones and Tua Tagovailoa who weren’t the full-time starters when their teams won it all):

  • 2014 Cardale Jones: 39.5 attempts per INT
  • 2015 Jake Coker: 49.1 attempts per INT
  • 2016 Deshaun Watson: 34.1 attempts per INT
  • 2017 Tua Tagovailoa: 38.5 attempts per INT
  • 2018 Trevor Lawrence: 99.3 attempts per INT
  • 2019 Joe Burrow: 87.8 attempts per INT
  • 2020 Mac Jones: 100.5 attempts per INT
  • 2021 Stetson Bennett IV: 41 attempts per INT
  • 2022 Stetson Bennett IV: 64.9 attempts per INT
  • 2023 JJ McCarthy: 83 attempts per INT

(Go figure that the 2 best national championship-winning quarterbacks at avoiding interceptions both currently play for the disappointing Jaguars. But that’s a different subject for a different time.)

Beck is at 1 interception for every 26.4 attempts, which doesn’t feel like it’s that far off from 2016 Watson (34.1) or 2021 Bennett (41), which is more relevant than 2014 Jones (39.5) or 2017 Tagovailoa (38.5), neither of whom were full-time starters like the other 8.

Context is important here. Watson threw 17 interceptions in 2016 — that’s the most by a national championship-winning QB since the BCS National Championship began in 1998 — but he did so while finishing as the Heisman runner-up. In other words, Watson’s good outweighed the bad by a significant margin. The guy had 50 total touchdowns. That negated the fact that he had 5 multi-interception games. He still had a QB rating of 153.2 vs. Power 5 competition, and after Watson’s 3 interceptions derailed Clemson in a stunning home loss to unranked Pitt, he became more of a rushing threat with 7 scores with his legs in the final 5 games.

Watson was still the driving force behind his team’s title run. Hence, why he got to New York. That’s a different story than Beck, who only has a handful of complete games this season.

We’ve seen 21st-century national championship-winning quarterbacks like Chris Leak, who threw 13 interceptions, though he was in a 2-QB system with Tim Tebow. There’s not anyone like Tebow for Georgia to turn to if Beck has a grenade game.

Kirby Smart has undeniable faith in Beck because at this point, he’s shown that he can respond to mistakes in-game. The question is when Beck’s mistakes will dig too big of a hole for UGA to overcome. Against Alabama, Beck’s mistakes technically weren’t too big to overcome because he erased the 30-7 deficit and got a late lead. In fact, Beck’s mistakes might’ve led to a more furious offensive pace for UGA:

To find a comparable mistake-prone quarterback to Beck on a national championship-winning team, go back to 2003, AKA the last year we had a split national champ. Matt Mauck threw an interception once every 25.6 attempts while leading LSU to a national title. LSU also had the No. 1 scoring defense in America and it averaged 186 rushing yards/game. Georgia, on the other hand, has the No. 13 scoring defense and the No. 97 rushing attack in FBS at 132 yards/game.

(I meant to add that the 2003 LSU team was coached by the best to ever do it, Nick Saban. That’s always worth a mention.)

Georgia needs more out of Beck than LSU needed out of Mauck. Period. That’s no disrespect to Mauck, but it’s a different sport than it was 21 years ago. Mauck attempted 25.6 passes per game compared to 36.3 for Beck.

In Smart’s 8 seasons at Georgia, his teams finished the season with at least 3 more rushing attempts per game than passing attempts per game. This year, Beck and the Dawgs are averaging 8.3 more passing attempts per game than rushing attempts. Injuries in the backfield might have something to do with that, but ultimately, that split is what it is because Beck was expected to be the strength of UGA’s roster. He hasn’t been that yet. Maybe he’ll never be that and he’ll fail to follow the 2016 Watson path to a title.

Georgia can probably win a title if Beck throws an interception per game. To Beck and the rest of that roster’s credit, it has shown it can overcome that. But it overcame that against Texas because the defense delivered an all-time dominant performance on the road. It overcame that against Florida in part because the Gators were down to their third-string quarterback by night’s end. UGA won those games despite Beck, not because of him.

That, more than anything else, needs to change. And “change” isn’t just simply putting together a nice drive late or making the right checks at the line, as Smart praised Beck for after the Florida win.

If Beck is going to continue to be somewhat mistake-prone for a national championship team, the good has to be Heisman-level good and/or UGA’s defense has to turn into one of the 3 best in the sport (it’s wild to think that UGA is only No. 29 in FBS in stop rate). Georgia won’t beat 3 consecutive top-12 teams in the Playoff if it fails to get that type of production.

Mind you, that’s just to have a chance at winning a title. Georgia can do all of those things and still come up short if Beck doesn’t tap into his inner Bennett with clutch drives in Playoff games. It might be easier than ever to make the field, but emerging out of it has never been more challenging. Beck could be the thing that prevents Georgia from reaching the mountaintop if adjustments aren’t made.

At this point, failing to accept that is as negligent as throwing into triple coverage.