GA has a far larger number of really tiny banks. They just haven't seen the same amount of consolidation over the last few decades that most of the rest of the industry has seen because Georgia's banking laws were designed to protect community banks from takeover, while other states (neighbor NC for instance) virtually encouraged it. So when the interstate banking laws were relaxed a couple decades back, some states saw banks gobbling each other up, while most GA banks weren't big enough to do any gobbling.
Most of the rest of the south has been about average for the nation with the obvious exception of Florida. There (IMO), it's a far more obvious reason for the high number of failures. That's where large amounts of real estate went belly up in a big way.
If you were to go look at all the GA banks shut down this year, many of them don't even make a large
branch for one of the banks that you've heard of (neither of these two does). Add all of them up together and you still don't equal one of the mid-sized banks that has failed in the last few years. So things aren't really all that much worse in GA (if at all), but if a certain percentage of banks in the area go bad, the raw number will be much higher.
The WallStreet Journal has an excellent tool that shows bank failures nationwide and lets you look at them by size, number of branches, loss to the FDIC, assets, etc.
http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/Failed-US-Banks.html
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