It has been a quiet offseason for senior linebacker Smael Mondon. When you miss spring practice, and the final game of the 2023 season, due to injury, you tend to fly under the radar.

Georgia’s inside linebacker room is brimming with young options. CJ Allen and Raylen Wilson have both been listed as breakout candidates. The Bulldogs also brought in two 5-star prospects in Justin Williams and Chris Cole. Then there’s Jalon Walker, a disruptive edge rusher who is looking to make a mark at inside linebacker as a junior.

All are promising players. Mondon once fit into that category as well. Now, he’s the senior leader and someone expected to be one of the best off ball linebackers in the country.

“We were discussing Mondon as a top-100 prospect this time last year, but he returned to school and should be one of the nation’s best linebackers,” ESPN’s Matt Miller said of Mondon. “At 6-foot-3 and 235 pounds, Mondon has excellent size and length, allowing him to be a three-down difference-maker who registered 42 tackles and three sacks last season. Improvement in pass coverage could make Mondon a top-five linebacker.”

Mondon likely could’ve been an NFL draft pick following his junior season. But various injuries kept him from being the best version of himself. He picked up a lower-body injury at the end of 2023′s spring practice and that seemed to slow him all season. When Jamon Dumas-Johnson broke his arm against Missouri, it put an even bigger burden on Mondon.

“I don’t really want to make no, like, excuses or nothing like that. It was just nagging injuries throughout the season,” Mondon said of his injury this spring. “I ended up breaking it toward the end of the year. It was just small stuff, but everybody’s out there hurt, so I ain’t going to really make no excuses about it.”

As a sophomore, Mondon finished with a team-high 76 tackles, 49 of which were solo tackles, to go along with 8.0 tackles for loss, a sack and an interception.

If he’s fully healthy in 2024, Mondon hopes he can standout not only in Georgia’s crowded linebacker room but among all the linebackers in the sport. The Bulldogs have produced two Butkus Award winners under Glenn Schumann and Mondon has the ability to be Georgia’s third.

Mondon had surgery to repair his foot, hence his absence this spring. That gave more key reps for the young players in the room.

Mondon will enter his third season as a starter at Georgia. Gone are his fellow 2021 signees as Dumas-Johnson is now at Kentucky and Xavian Sorey transferred to Arkansas. Mondon could’ve potentially exited as well.

Yet he knew he had unfinished business at Georgia.

“I just wanted to finish things the right way, you know? I was kind of banged up throughout the year,” Mondon said on why he wanted to return for another season. “At the end of the season we didn’t really finish off how we wanted to, so kind of like a mix of those two.”

Mondon won a national championship in his first season as a start. If he’s able to return to full health — Kirby Smart expects Mondon to be 100 percent at the start of fall camp in August — he is the kind of player that could make a difference in terms of winning a national championship and not.