This post was written by Nick Suss. He is the men’s basketball beat reporter for The Red and Black, the University of Georgia’s independent student newspaper.

The University of Georgia is not a basketball school.

Don’t let the 6-5 record or the 73.3 points per game fool you into thinking that the Bulldogs’ basketball team is formidable. Those numbers will skew your thinking. The true story of the season lies in story of the team’s last home game.

Facing a then-6-7 Western Carolina team and riding a four-game winning streak, the Bulldogs should have squashed the lesser and physically smaller Catamounts. But Georgia needed an 11-1 run spanning the game’s final seven minutes just to squeak out a two-point victory.

Stealing an unwarranted victory from an inferior team, UGA wheezed out of its last non-conference home game on a five-game winning streak. Head coach Mark Fox summed the game up best.

“I thought their team deserved to win that game more than ours did,” Fox said. “We did not play well, we did not shoot free throws well and at the end, when we tried to miss a free throw [to run out the clock], we make the son of a gun.”

Therein lies the main theme of the 2013-14 Georgia men’s basketball season: The team is winning games, but given the quality of opponents, it should be winning better.

There definitely is talent on this team. Sophomore guards Charles Mann and Kenny Gaines both average double-digit scoring per game and junior forward Nemanja Djursic adds more than 11 points per game primarily off the bench.

Additionally, the team averages about 37 rebounds per game, led by the team’s lone senior Donte’ Williams at 5.5 per game, and still remains unbeaten when having won the rebounding battle. With plenty of tall players, six Bulldogs check in between 6-foot-8 and 6-foot-10, a number at least comparable to GW’s number of big men.

So don’t read this to say that this game is a lock for your 11-2 Colonials. Georgia is after all 6-1 against mid-major schools this season, the only loss being to perennial bracket-buster Davidson in an early season tournament. In fact, one should remember that the comatose 2012-13 Bulldogs actually defeated GW last season in Athens while only scoring 52 points.

Of course, SEC Player of the Year and current Detroit Piston Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is no longer playing his unique brand of 1-verus-5 basketball on the floor of Stegeman Coliseum for the squad as he did when the Bulldogs defeated the Colonials, but by all accounts this team is a better team than last season’s incarnation.

Regardless of how poorly the Bulldogs have played against quality opponents (0-5 against “BCS’ conferences and Davidson) or how much worse the team has played in the second halves of games, having multiple times blown double-digit second half advantages to nearly lose the lead, this is still a talented basketball team filled with, in some, cases, the best talent the state of Georgia has to offer.

So, the University of Georgia is not a basketball school. Yes, UGA is practically incapable of selling out multiple home games per season. Aside from a select few students, very few non-athletes on campus are aware that our opponent is in D.C. and an even smaller number care about the outcome. Most students probably are still busy lamented Wednesday’s Gator Bowl loss at the hands of Nebraska rather than moving on to the impending SEC schedule for the basketball team.

But to count this team out of any game because of this would be fallacious. If Mann, Gaines, Djurisic, Williams, freshman guard Juwan Parker and junior forward Marcus Thornton can all play at their highest potential as they had been over the recent home stand, there are very few teams the Dawgs couldn’t at least compete with.

Will this game be a cakewalk for either Georgia or GW? Probably not. But if the game follows a typical Georgia basketball pace, the home crowd is going to be in for one exciting finish as a prelude to conference play.