ATHENS - The final month of the regular season is here. Kirby Smart and the Georgia Bulldogs are ranked No. 2 in the first College Football playoff poll with every goal is right in front of them.

Still, like every other team in college football, the Bulldogs still have their challenges. After the grind of an SEC schedule, Smart told reporters this week he's hoping his team can stay healthy long enough to play their very best when it matters most. Right now, the way the Dawgs are playing, that could come in January.

“Staying healthy," Smart told reporters this week. "There are lots of challenges. The challenge is to go on the road and play in an atmosphere that's extremely hard to play in, but his week is my single focus."

"If you talk about our greatest challenge the rest of the season, it's can we do it better than whoever else does it? That's an objective for us every day to go out and do it better than other teams. I do think that our teams have gotten better throughout the year, historically, and that's the goal again. Do we get a cumulative effect of what we've been doing? Do you hit a peak and then start going down? I don't know. I certainly hope that we're on the ascent.”

In a wild season of college football, Georgia's consistency has stood out at much as anyones. Well, at least for one game. Smart has pride in his team's improvement, and over the course of several regular seasons, Georgia's improved play has been a consistent theme.

As for this year, Georgia's toughest stretch of the season comes now. There's no bottom-dwellers in the league left on the schedule. The Dawgs will play a tough Ole Miss team on the road this weekend before coming back home to play another top-25 team in Missouri. Both teams have experienced quarterbacks who should test Georgia's secondary. Then comes a hot South Carolina team with a big-play dual-threat quarterback. Another guy with experience that the Bulldogs have not seen before.

So Smart's right. He knows what's coming, and he's hoping to see his team improve. Because when it's all said and done, the team that wins the national championship is typically the team playing their best at the end of the season. The Bulldogs have not been that team for three consecutive years now, but if the Dawgs can show improvement over the final few weeks of the season, it could be very tough to know them off this winter.