Sugar Bowl 2025: Odds, Box Score Prediction for Notre Dame vs. Georgia

This year's Sugar Bowl should be sweet.

It's a College football Playoff quarterfinal, so the stakes are enormous, and the level of competition is appropriately stacked.

On one side is a Notre Dame team that hasn't lost since the first week of September and has posted a best-in-FBS average point differential of plus-25. On the other is Georgia, whose past three seasons included a pair of national championships with a 60-point Orange Bowl win in the other and whose current campaign has featured four victories over top-15 opponents, including two against Texas, the second of which delivered the SEC title.

This is the kind of elite-versus-elite showdown that makes bowl season so spectacular, and oddsmakers expect this to be the kind of back-and-forth affair that will help college football fans get their 2025 off to an exhilarating start.

What: Allstate Sugar Bowl

Who: No. 7 Notre Dame vs. No. 2 Georgia

When: Wednesday Jan. 1 at 8:45 p.m. ET

Where: Caesars Superdome in New Orleans

TV: ESPN

Stream: WatchESPN

Spread: Georgia (-1)

Over/Under: 46

Money Line: Notre Dame (-105; bet $105 to win $100); Georgia (-115; bet $115 to win $100)

Odds via DraftKings Sportsbook.

Recent history says this should be Georgia's game to lose. Not-so-recent history tends to agree. The Bulldogs haven't lost a bowl game in six years. The Fighting Irish, meanwhile, last won a major bowl game in 1994.

What does that mean for this under-the-spotlight showdown? Quite possibly nothing, honestly.

Notre Dame's history has no bearing on its current bunch, and Georgia's previous performances feel a lot less relevant to this contest given all the roster turnover that occurs on an annual basis and the (potentially enormous) fact that starting quarterback Carson Beck is out following elbow surgery, meaning sophomore Gunner Stockton will make his first career start in this high-stakes affair.

The Bulldogs are always loaded with talent, and this year's team is no exception. Still, the Irish might be just as loaded, and their formula of having an elite defense and an elite rushing attack is a kind that often proves impossible to handle this time of year.

Notre Dame's defense ranked top-five nationally in points allowed per game (13.8) and yards allowed per play (4.5). That rushing attack, meanwhile, features a two-headed monster at running back in Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price, plus dual-threat quarterback Riley Leonard. All three rushed for better than 600 yards and tallied a combined 38 rushing scores.

This might be a defense-dominant, ground-and-pound kind of game, and it's hard not to like Notre Dame's chances of thriving under those conditions.

Prediction: Notre Dame 24, Georgia 20

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