ATHENS — Kirby Smart is ready to see what this Georgia football team is all about.

No, not the program — the program is built to sustain with a proven system in place.

It’s the “team” Smart will be watching closely, in terms of how the players come together and collectively respond to the challenges he and his staff have in store for them.

“The biggest focus for us in training camp is physical and mental toughness,” Smart explained on Wednesday, the day before the official start of call camp. “That’s why we do training camp. We try to expose our guys to a lot of scheme.”

The Bulldogs’ players have already been exposed to the Athens heat, sweating side by side throughout the month of July.

“It got really hot,” Smart noted, “and from our July 4th break on, our guys have trained really hard in the heat, had a lot of acclimation.”

The eighth-year Georgia head coach made it clear things are not nearly as settled as some fans would like to believe, from the quarterback position on down.

“We’ve got a lot of jobs that are going to be up for grabs and up for competition,” Smart said, “and I’m very eager to see our guys compete for those spots.”

As for those quarterbacks, Carson Beck is the odds-on favorite to start and begins fall drills No. 1.

But Smart doesn’t want his players to get caught up in numbers, so much as he’s looking for them to have the discipline to stay focused and avoid mistakes.

“They’re going to get a lot of reps in the next 25 practices, they’re going to get a chance to compete in the next 25 practices,” Smart said. “Each one of them has individual things they need to work on, but for the whole I want to see them manage the offense, understand the offense, get people lined up and execute.

“The guy that does that best in critical situations will be the guy that becomes the quarterback.”

Which is to say, the job is open.

So, too, are game captain slots, which are earned more so than given throughout the season.

Smart said there are plenty of good leaders on the team, but now it’s a matter of them coming together.

Synergy - the concept of the sum being greater than the parts.

Georgia has recruited elite talent and the coaches have developed those players well, but team chemistry is very much an intangible.

Warren Brinson, a rising fourth-year junior, explained how the 2023 team is viewed as separate from the 2021 and 2022 CFP title squads, even while possessing many of the same players.

“Those teams are gone, far gone,” Brinson said earlier this offseason in a Players’ Lounge interview. “We’re a whole new team, and we’re still trying to find our identity and who we are.”

Smart knows how to build and shape a football team arguably better than any coach in the country at the moment, having built a program that has won an unprecedented back-to-back CFP Championships.

A former Georgia All-SEC player himself, Smart explained how pivotal this time of the year really is.

“I think the difference in the two teams from the last two years is they connected well in training camp,” Smart said. “That will be a goal in this training camp, to see how well we connect and how well we compete.”

The countdown to the Sept. 2 opening game against UT-Martin at Sanford Stadium has begin in earnest.