A familiar foe in a new setting is sprucing up Auburn’s rivalry with Georgia.

When No. 22 Auburn travels to Athens, Ga., for a 5:30 p.m. CT tip against Georgia at Stegeman Coliseum, Bruce Pearl will once again be going toe to toe with a coach who has gotten the best of him in recent years. Georgia coach Mike White, formerly the head coach at Florida for seven seasons, has won six of his teams’ nine matchups against Pearl’s Auburn squads since the 2015-16 season.

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“Mike White has done a great job against me personally,” Pearl said. “I told you guys about matchups; I think matchups matter. I think he’s done a good job with his teams.”

Now White will try to continue to be a thorn in Pearl’s side with his new team at Georgia, where he took over in the offseason after making the jump from Gainesville, Fla., to Athens.

White’s Bulldogs have gotten off to a strong start this season, already eclipsing the team’s win total from last season. Georgia won just six games during the 2021-22 campaign and is off to a 10-3 start to the season in Year 1 under White that includes an 8-0 mark at home.

“The more I watch Georgia—and obviously, we’ve had time to watch Georgia—the more impressed I’ve been with them, “Pearl said. “Mike has come in and done a really good job. They’ve got an older, veteran team with a lot of transfers. They’re playing pretty well right now. They still, you know, don’t know a lot about themselves in the sense that they haven’t played as tough of a schedule. But I think as a result, they’ve built up some confidence.

“They’re way better than they were a year ago. They’re just way better than a year ago.”

To that end, Georgia has yet to play a game against a Quad 1 opponent this season and is 0-2 in Quad 2 games. Only two high-major programs have played, and won, more Quad 4 games this season than the Bulldogs, who are 8-0 in those matchups.

Still, Pearl isn’t taking Georgia lightly, even as Auburn has won eight of the last 10 meetings in the series. Between that trend and White’s string of success against Pearl’s Auburn teams, something has to give Wednesday evening at Stegeman Coliseum.

“We’ll go back and look at how they guard us and what they ran against us and try to make some anticipation as to what they’ll do — whether they do some of the things they’ve done,” Pearl said. “Typically, coaches like Mike — I’m not going to put him in my category as far as age is concerned, I won’t do that to him — but Mike’s been around long enough that he’s a veteran coach. Veterans typically do what veterans do.”

What White has typically done against Pearl’s teams is limit them offensively. In White’s six wins against Auburn while at Florida, the Gators held the Tigers to 65 points per game. In Pearl’s three head-to-head victories against White, Auburn’s scoring average was 10 points higher (75.3). Still, the Tigers scored more than 80 points just twice in those nine games.

White has brought that same defensive tenacity to Georgia, where the Bulldogs have been much improved on that end this season. Georgia is 83rd nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency this season, according to KenPom, and the Bulldogs have given up 80-plus points just twice so far—in losses to Wake Forest and UAB. Last year’s Georgia team was 318th in adjusted defensive efficiency and gave up nearly 80 points per game on average (78.5 for the year).

“You can scout them and look at what they’re doing against others, but then against us, oftentimes, they’ll do something different than what they’ve been doing,” Pearl said of White’s teams. “Unique to us. And so sometimes it’s — because not everybody plays like we do. It’s hard to look at what other people are doing and then figure ‘Well, that’s what they’re going to do.’ The matchup obviously has been competitive. It’s getting harder and harder to predict what people are going to do against us. So, you’ve just got to be prepared for no matter what they do and make the adjustments on the fly.”

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.