NEW ORLEANS — Kirby Smart had a lot to say on Monday.
The Georgia head coach answered questions for nearly an hour ahead of the Sugar Bowl against Notre Dame.
Below is a transcript of what Smart had to say about a number of topics, ranging from Gunner Stockton, Notre Dame quarterback Riley Leonard and much more.
Georgia takes on Notre Dame at 8:45 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
What Kirby Smart said ahead of Georgia football-Notre Dame game
COACH SMART: It’s an honor to be here today. Any time you get an opportunity to play in a Sugar Bowl, it’s a special time. I think it’s one of the most historic bowls there is. It’s even better when it’s part of the CFP. Our guys have been hard at work in preparing for what is a great opponent in Notre Dame. I have a lot of respect for Coach [Marcus] Freeman and his staff. We have intertwined staff. We’ve gone against each other at different times. I think we turn on the tape, their play speaks for itself, their physicality, their toughness. I have a lot of respect for their program, and we’re excited to be here, and very thankful that we get to play in a venue event, a historic game. All the classic Sugar Bowls I grew up watching, it’s always great to be a part of that. So, with that, I’ll close it out.
Q. I just had a quick question about Notre Dame’s physicality. How has it varied since you’ve played him in the past, since 2017, 2019? And would you say it has the physicality or the feel of an SEC team at times?
COACH SMART: Yeah, when we talk about their team, it’s depth, like their backups, their starters, their offensive line, their receiving corps, their defensive line, they’re big. And that’s what it starts with in the SEC. The line of scrimmages have to have size and girth because you have to take on these teams week in and week out that have great size. Notre Dame is built that way. They’re built that way on paper. But then what you see on the tape speaks louder than the paper does. You see how they play. You see the toughness they play with. The linebackers are downhill, thumping. The backs are elite. They’re built like an SEC team. And I say that as a huge compliment, because I think those rosters are some of the most talented in the country. And Notre Dame is built that way, probably more on the side of physicality.
Q. First of all, yesterday, as you well know, Jimmy Carter died. I wonder if you ever had any chance to meet him, and what he -- and if you knew that he attended the Notre Dame-Georgia Sugar Bowl back in 1980.
COACH SMART: I didn’t know that.
Q. Just what he meant to someone like you that’s a native of Georgia, and would you like to see some kind of a salute to him tomorrow night at the game?
COACH SMART: Yeah, that’s probably not a question for me to answer, as far as a salute to him. But I certainly salute his life plan, his lifestyle, the way he lived his life. He embodies the Georgia culture in terms of being from a state, agricultural state. He’s from a part of the state where I’m from, the southwest corner of the state. And there’s so many things that he did for our state beyond people’s even recognition. Just the fact that he was President of the United States and was a fellow Georgian is a pretty special feat. And I didn’t ever get to meet him personally. I have a lot of acquaintances, obviously, that know him. And tremendous amount of respect for what he did and what he meant to our state.
Q. James Franklin yesterday talked about the need for a commissioner of football, with everything that’s going on. Suggested Nick [Saban] would be good for it. I don’t think he’s coming out of retirement. Anyway, what do you feel like -- I saw you the other day when they asked you about everything going on in December, how much trouble -- the distractions with the NIL and transfer portal while you’re trying to get ready. Does college football need a different structure, a commissioner, and maybe something outside of what you have now with conferences calling their own calls?
COACH SMART: That’s a really hard question and a really long question. I don’t know that it’s as simple as saying, Let’s name a commissioner and it solves all our problems. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we’re governed by separate circumstances. Conferences govern us. NCAA governs us. Now we have courts governing us. And nobody is over all of those. I think a commissioner would be a nice thing in theory, but what can they effectively get done if everybody can’t agree on something? And Nick would be great. I know he’s a huge advocate for college football. He wants to make it better. He’s always been a person that believed in leave it better than you found it, and I have a lot of respect for the way he does it. But I’m probably not the guy that can tell you what a commissioner can and can’t do in terms of making it a better process for all of us.
Q. Kirby, just very open-ended question, but what makes Gunner Stockton a good quarterback?
COACH SMART: Well, I think the number one thing a quarterback has to have is decision-making skill. Number one, he makes really good decisions. Number two thing for a quarterback is accuracy. Not necessarily arm talent, but accuracy. He has accuracy. So decision-making is a skill. Accuracy is a huge skill. Athletic ability and talent probably takes over third. He has those traits. All the intangibles in terms of toughness, character, embody what he was raised on. His dad was a really good football player, played at Georgia Southern. He’s been raised around football. He’s a coach’s son. All the players play harder for him. Do you make the players around you better is what you look for in a quarterback. I think he raises the skill level of everybody around him because of who he is. So that’s my reason for believing he’s a good quarterback.
Q. Kirby, a lot is going to be talked about Gunner [Stockton] leading up to this game. But what have you seen from your backups, Ryan [Puglisi] and Jaden Rashada in the game? Have you recognized one of the two as the number two quarterback?
COACH SMART: They’ve done a great job. Number one, it makes you realize how close you are to having to go in the game when it’s the next thing. When you’re sitting there with a guy between you and the guy, it’s different than when you’re the guy and you’ve got to be the next guy. And their reps have gone up. So, in a weird way, it’s been a blessing because I’ve seen both those kids really accelerate. You’d like to have seen that acceleration without this happening. But they’ve gotten more reps, they’ve gotten more important reps. And they’re taking all of Gunner’s reps, because Gunner’s taking all of Carson’s [Beck] reps. I’ve been very pleased with both those guys. And I think they’ve embraced the role and understand it’s just a lot more urgent now, and I’m proud of what both of them are doing.
Q. I was wondering if you could talk about Bryce Young, No. 30 on Notre Dame’s defense, and how you prepare for such a young player with a unique skill set who can be kind of a game changer on special teams.
COACH SMART: Yeah, he is an exceptional player. I wasn’t aware of him until we watched a little bit of tape on both Indiana and Notre Dame before we knew who we were going to play. And I was like, Who is this guy, 30? He is long. He is athletic. He twitchy. And then while watching the game, he showed up more. It was like, he made some flash plays. He’s rusher, he’s edge. And then when I dug deeper into special teams, I’m like, This guy is phenomenal on special teams, his reach, his athleticism. I mean, I don’t know about what he lists, but he looks bigger than he lists on paper. And he’s just going to be a phenomenal talent. To do what he’s done this early in his career just shows you how talented he’s going to be.
Q. Kirby, how familiar are you with Anthonie Knapp, the left tackle for Notre Dame? And did you ever be able to recruit him? I know he was right in the backyard there at Roswell.
COACH SMART: Yeah. Number one, he is playing really well, doing a great job. I remember him vividly being on our list and being a guy that’s a good football player. I don’t know how actively we recruited him, because I can’t remember what class he came out in. He was last year’s class, I guess, yeah. I remember going by there, and he was getting ready to go to school, and we were actually looking at maybe another kid at their school that just came out this year. And what a good-looking kid he was; and he’s playing at a high level for them, doing a great job. I know this, the Georgia high school football programs put out kids all over the country. I was watching last night the football -- the Monday Night Football game. I guess it was Monday night. Maybe it wasn’t Monday night, Sunday night. So we were watching the Falcons game. There’s A.J. Terrell making a hit on Chris Rodriguez, a kid from Kentucky and a kid from Clemson hitting each other, trying to make plays. And there’s Georgia kids all over that field. The one thing you learn quickly being the head coach at Georgia is you can’t sign them all. And there’s a lot of them that you end up missing on. And for a guy to start at freshman at tackle is really hard to do. Like, probably one of the hardest things to do in football is play offensive line as a freshman, and he’s doing it at eye level.
Q. In previous years, when you talked about this time of year and how important it was with you developing your players and the younger players, with all the recent changes as far as the portal, NIL, and all of that, how has that affected this part of it, as far as development?
COACH SMART: Yeah, I don’t know how much -- I feel like the years that we’ve had really good development are the years we get more practices. So this year, we’ve gotten, I don’t know, 12, 13 bonus practices. And those are where you develop your roster at. It’s where you get, like, an extra spring practice. So it’s almost a multiplier, where, all right, I’ve got two spring practices for my guys, sometimes for your midyears; but I get extra practices to get our guys ready. The SEC championship game is an extra week of practice. I don’t know that the portal or NIL has any effect on that development. What affects that development is if more of your guys go in the portal, you’ve got less players to develop. So the guys that are in the transition period, the ones who went in and aren’t practicing with their teams, and the ones that are getting ready to come to your team, they’re not practicing with you so they’re not getting better. So the people that stay put tend to develop better and get better as they go. And that’s kind of been the proof in the pudding for us. We haven’t been a huge portal team in terms of taking guys out of it. We like to develop our own roster and grow our own roster from within. But certainly, we want to get better each year with somebody from the portal, and we try to do both.
Q. Both these football teams feature a quarterback whose legs could be a portion of this game. But you run into that area where you’re trying to make sure your starting quarterback survives the football game. How do you go about winning this game, using your quarterback’s legs, while also making sure, Hey, we get this guy out of here upright?
COACH SMART: Yeah, you have to do everything you can. It’s win or go home, so there is no measure of, well, I’ve got to be conservative on this. I’ve got to be conservative on that. I mean, is your quarterback a better running back than your running backs is the first question. Hard to believe with the backs they’ve got, and hard to believe with the backs we’ve got, that either of our quarterbacks are better. They are an extra hat. They bring an extra dimension. Red area, super-high tendency to run the quarterback. Zone read teams, ability to pull the ball, eye candy, option plays, both teams execute those. I don’t think either coordinator will be holding back because they’re worried about the next game. They’re going to do whatever they have to do to win this game. And if Gunner [Stockton] or Riley [Leonard] had to run the ball 30 times during the game, I think both coordinators would do that. It’s not the makeup of the offenses; but whatever they’ve got to do to win the game, they’ll do.
Q. I wanted to ask you specifically about Jahzare Jackson, 6′11″, didn’t play high school football. How do you come across a guy like that? I mean, how did he pop up on the radar? What did you do to go pursue him?
COACH SMART: Well, he did play football all his life growing up until eighth grade. And he was a high-level football player in the eighth grade. Most people don’t track eighth graders. We weren’t tracking him, but he was getting invited to IMG. He had an opportunity to go play at some high-level football programs, even in South Georgia, which is completely new for him, where you find some basketball players that never played football. He played football growing up. He just had a break there where he didn’t, and he focused on basketball. But he came to a camp and worked out for us over the summer, like he did for about five schools. We felt like he had a lot of traits you look for, and you can’t coach size. Had great athleticism. He’s had a big curve in terms of physicality, sticking your face in there, learning terms, movements, passing off twists. There’s so many things you learn from ninth grade to 12th grade. He’s trying to learn all four years in a year. And you can’t put four years into one year and just say, Magically, oh this guy is ready to go. Doesn’t work like that. He has taken strides this year towards getting better. And as long as he continues to take those strides, the sky is the limit. But some people think it’s just about athleticism and you put a guy out there. There’s so much more to playing offensive line than just talent. There’s a lot of traits there that he’s still working on.
Q. Kirby, it’s so difficult to find someone who everybody likes. Everybody can’t have that in life. But with Gunner [Stockton], it seems like everybody I talk to just loves the kid. Why is that?
COACH SMART: He’s lovable. I mean, a team player. I think everybody has a different personality. Every player on our team is not the same. I’m not the same as the other coaches are. Gunner has a lovable trait that everybody wants to do well for him. Everybody sees the humility he goes about his work with. He’s not a big talker. He doesn’t expect you to recognize him and acknowledge him as the guy that’s doing extra work. He just does it. He doesn’t look for credit for it. He embodies what a great teammate is; and he’s been that way since I’ve known him, which has been a long time. People respect that nowadays. They appreciate that, especially in their quarterback, because he’s not a “look at me” type guy. It’s just not who he is.
Q. Coach, I was just wondering if you could speak to the difficulty of defending a duo concept when you have a running quarterback like Riley Leonard who is so mobile and such a threat with his legs. Can you speak to the difficulty of defending Riley when you know he has the option to leave the pocket?
COACH SMART: Yeah, he’s a tremendous athlete. You’re playing pass and he takes off running as opposed to it’s a designed run. When it’s a designed run, everybody knows it’s a run. Okay, I got to stop the quarterback. I got to stop the back. Maybe I got to stop an RPO. But when it’s a drop-back pass, you’re trying to stop everybody else. And the four, three, five, six rushers are responsible for Riley [Leonard]. Most of our three, four, five, six rushers aren’t quite the athlete he is. So when you put a 300-pound blocker on a defensive lineman and say, Block him, and that guy’s got to beat that guy and get to the quarterback, it’s a challenge. This kid was a great basketball player. He can throw the fade routes. He can throw timing routes. He can run. He’s hard to tackle, really hard to tackle. We told our players, when you approach him, you better approach him with the attitude that he’s a back, and you’ve got to wrap him up and get him on the ground.
Q. Coach, we’re seeing a lot of the freshman back Nate Frazier. What can you tell us about some other fellow freshmen backs, Chauncey Bowens and Dwight Phillips Jr.?
COACH SMART: Both are going to be really good players. Both great kids.
Q. Coach, can you speak to the bowl preparation practices, someone like Elyiss Williams, for example. As far as his preparation with the team, has he been able to fit in? I mean, he stands out, obviously, at 6′8″. What have you seen from him in preparation?
COACH SMART: Those kids have only practiced like two days with us. That’s really hard. Probably unfair assessment, because they don’t know where to go in flex lines. They don’t know what stretches to do. They don’t know -- you know, they don’t know up from down right now because we don’t have them in our teams. They’re just jumping in practice to kind of get a small taste and try to give us a better look of Notre Dame. It’s so different when you have someone you know can’t play in the game at practice. Everybody out there can play in the game except for those guys. So you get to kind of put them to the side and say, Okay, during individual, we’re going to work on your development and get you better as a football player and get you in shape and lift you and get you more prepared for January and February. But when it comes to scheme and how we do our offense and defense, you have nothing to do with that right now. You just go represent the opponent, and I think those midyears have done a good job doing that.
Q. Here’s what I meant by Ellis, Coach. Can you talk about the development of Ellis Robinson, highly recruited and got into a few games.
COACH SMART: Yeah, Ellis is a really solid, good football player. Throughout the year, he has grown so much maturity-wise, because he went from probably being really good that can cover, that was always worried about giving up a completion. He’s so competitive. He gets so mad if he gives up a play, and he wants to make every play. So sometimes he gives up plays trying to not let guys get completions when you’re a lot better off just understanding what the defense gives you. If you play cover two and you say, Hey, I want to give up the flat, I don’t want to give up the corner route, he was going to try to cover both. He’s learned to play in the defense. He is so much further along in terms of assignments. Okay, what do I do if they motion to a stack? What do I do in a bunch? What is my communication to the safety? He took so much pride from about game -- I don’t know, seven, eight, nine, somewhere in there, where he started, like, okay, I’ve got to prove to these guys I can communicate, because every team now shifts and motions every play. So they make you change things and change looks. If it was as easy as just go out there and cover, he’s one of our best cover guys. But you have to do other things, and he has gotten so much better at picking that up. I’m proud of the way he competes. He’s also one of the most physically tough guys we have, because he’s not afraid of contact. Most corners don’t like contact. Ellis is not afraid of contact, and he likes tackling.
Q. Coach, I realize ‘17 and ‘19 were a long time ago against Notre Dame. But does this team feel similarly constructed to those or different in any way when you flip on the tape? I’m thinking particularly at running back, like they had Josh Adams back then. Jeremiyah Love is a different kind of back.
COACH SMART: Yeah, somebody asked me that earlier when we got the matchup. It’s so hard for me to answer, because I don’t go back to those tapes because of the difference in staff, obviously. But it seems that way. It seems constructed in a physical nature, offensive and defensive lines. We’re not going to beat ourselves, in terms of Georgia and Notre Dame, either team. We’re not going to beat ourselves. Don’t turn the ball over. Not highly penalized. Great special teams. Run the ball and believe in the run, instead of standard of run, but can be explosive. Athletic quarterbacks. They’ve had athletic quarterbacks the times we’ve played them. I mean, so much of that mirrors those games. But let’s be honest, those games have nothing to do with these games.
Q. Riley Leonard, in terms of the run threat, you’ve faced plenty of mobile quarterbacks, but how is he maybe similar or different to others? And what’s the challenge of him as a run threat, particularly down in the low red?
COACH SMART: Yeah. He’s big, he’s physical, he’s fast. He runs away from people. I mean, if you’re an offensive coordinator, this guy is a huge weapon because there’s kids like him before that couldn’t throw the ball. He can throw the ball. And when you can throw the ball and you’re big and you’re fast and you run, but you have experience -- You can almost count on a quarterback to make a mistake in a game. And like he’s going to make a mistake, it’s going to be costly. Not when you have one with the experience he has. The value he got out of playing the entire season and being really successful at Duke and then to come here and play an entire season and be really successful -- look, the quarterback determines so much of the game in terms of what he does with the ball: Throwing it, catching it. I mean, they put three options on him on a lot of plays, and he’s going to be right almost all the time. That creates -- really tough on defenses, especially when you’ve got to go tackle that guy. He’s hard to tackle. Q. Kirby, how can you sustain a championship-level culture with all of the complications surrounding recruitment and retention in the industry these days?
COACH SMART: A belief in our culture. It’s as simple as keeping our players our players, staying connected. We believe we’re better together than we are apart. And we firmly believe as a coaching staff that if you stay in our organization for two, three years, you’re going to be a contributor and you’re going to win championships, because we want to keep the glue together. And the glue staying together nowadays looks different than it used to. A 98% retention rate was pretty normal ten years ago, and now 70% retention rate will probably get you in the top of the country. And we’re trying to coach and develop our players better than anybody, and keep our players together, and make sure they believe in the system they’re in. And I think we’ve done that as well as anybody.
Q. Coach Smart, I know Carson [Beck] has been hurt. But over the past few weeks, since the SEC championship game, what sort of role has he played on the team? Is he trying to mentor Gunner [Stockton] and Jaden [Rashada] and the other quarterbacks that are likely going to get a lot more reps now? Is he still around? Is he giving advice to the quarterback room?
COACH SMART: Yeah, he’s going to join us in the next couple of days down here. Big thing for him has been a part of his rehab process and what all he’s had to do. He’s had a really tough injury. He needed to get some rehab from people in Jacksonville. He’s got a specialist that has worked with this injury. Brock Purdy had a very similar injury. Nick Mullens, I think [Matthew] Stafford. He had several people. So when you talk about his team of people, including the surgeons, he’s had to do a lot of work with that. So he’s been there for Gunner throughout. He’s supported Gunner, had multiple conversations with him. Looking forward to having him with us for this game.
Q. Kirby, with so much player movement these days, how tough can it be to maintain a deep quarterback room, and how much of a priority is that for you guys year to year to try and do that, even with guys moving around so much?
COACH SMART: I think it’s hard everywhere in the country now because that’s probably the most transient position. So when you start looking at it, it’s in and out, in and out, in and out. At one point, it was like, I can’t even figure out -- every starting quarterback played somewhere else. And it’s like, you can’t even follow these guys. You have to have a tag that says where they were, where they’ve been, where they’re going. It’s impossible which -- I’m not saying that’s wrong, because I’ve got a son who plays quarterback that’s 12 years old. If they don’t play, they want to go play somewhere else. They want to go to the next option. I do think when you look at Carson’s [Beck] history, he did it the right way in terms of not waiting, because that’s not the right word. “Developing” is the right word. Just because you’re playing, you aren’t necessarily getting better. Just because you’re hopping from offense to offense, you’re not actually giving yourself more chance at success. Success comes to those who are willing to work, and we always say you work while you wait. Also, it doesn’t offend me when somebody says, “I think I have a better opportunity somewhere else.” And I’m so happy for Brock Vandagriff that he got an opportunity to go to Kentucky to play, to live out his dream and play football. And he did everything right by us. So it’s hard to maintain a room, but you just go into the portal and find another one. It’s a deal where you just find the next guy and hope you find the right guy. Everybody’s looking for Cam Ward, Joe Burrow, these guys that can go and be successful. We like to grow ours in-house and have them develop and be a part of the team and have relationships with everybody, but that doesn’t always give you the best guy.
Q. I’ve talked to you before about the difficulty of maintaining greatness year after year after year. And obviously, you had the best sort of mentor in doing that possible in Coach [Nick] Saban. The question you were just answering about quarterbacks leads to why it is so challenging to maintain year after year. So, I’m curious, has this year been more challenging than previous years because of just you’ve been at the top for a long time, and so a lot of people have come after you and sort of try to chip away at it.
COACH SMART: No, I don’t think this year had anything to do with being more difficult because of the past success. I think everybody’s coming after you every year anyway. I mean, we’ve been -- people have been coming after us, after the two national championships, for a while. It didn’t make this year any difficult. What was difficult about this year was our schedule. We had a really challenging schedule. When you look at who we played and where we played them and what time we played them, it’s just a fact. Nobody has as much depth in college football as they’ve had in previous years. They never will again. There will never be a roster like the roster I got to coach at Alabama where we had three, four guys that were capable of playing. You had sophomore and junior offensive linemen that were waiting their turn to play, but they were NFL talent. That’s not going to exist because kids are going to be up and moving more often. And I think we have to get used to that norm, because that’s what it is. I don’t necessarily think it’s good for kids, because I think when they look back 15, 20 years from now, there’s going to be a group that -- a higher rate, once you transferred once, you become a multiple-transfer guy. And then when they look at the multiple-transfer guys, they’re going to say they don’t graduate. If you went to two or more schools, I think your graduation is going to drop. Graduation rate is going to drop, and it’s not necessarily a good thing for that. But in terms of difficulty for our schedule this year, our team, it was a very challenging year, because we played a lot of really good teams. We played more close games than we ever have before, but that’s a model closer to the NFL model. And I’m very comfortable with that model.
Q. Coach, kind of on the topic of transfers and how there are some position groups that can be really transient, when people -- I mean, you’re not going to get a receiver room like Alabama had in 2016-2017. But are there certain position groups on the field where they are the most impacted by players’ willingness to just transfer right away and not stay in a program like they maybe would have in the past?
COACH SMART: Am I understanding the question right? You’re asking if there’s a position group that is affected by the movement of transfers more than others? Yeah, I think wide receivers. I think outside of quarterback, the most often transferred position, to me -- and I don’t know this for a fact -- it’s wide receiver. And you get a lot of turnover there. Well, fortunately, you can play freshmen there. Fortunately, you sometimes get forced to playing freshmen because you have the most movement at that position. That may have something to do with the fact that they’re just used to getting the ball. They’re skill players. When they don’t get the ball, they think that the grass is going to be greener on the other side, and a lot of times, they don’t find that. We did a study where every guy that went in the portal as a receiver that went to another school, we did their stats from where they left from and where they went to after two years; and it actually was a greater decline than it was an increase, meaning you don’t find more success by going to another place. There’s no proof in that. As a matter of fact, it declined the year we looked at it. So, I think DBs, too, defensive backs, are a close cousin of wide receivers, so they think that they’re going to find something better easier somewhere else. And it doesn’t always end up that way.
Q. Quick followup on that. In regard to wide receivers and defensive backs, in that study that you looked at, has that changed your willingness to take either of those positions out of the portal, or has that sort of made you rethink how important it is to recruit those positions out of high school?
COACH SMART: No. We have to take them out of the portal. It’s forced us to take more, not less, because the maturity level that you bring in has to be ready to go on the field. That’s not always the case in high school. I would love to be able to take high school kids, bring them straight in, grow them, have them ready to play; but that’s not always the case. We’ve taken fewer guys out of the portal than any top team in the country, but I don’t know that I -- I don’t know that you can say taking high school kids replaces a kid that’s a sophomore, junior, senior in your room. And I don’t think anybody wants to line up next year with six freshmen in that room and nobody else. So, what you end up doing is you take some maturity, you take an older, more physical kid who’s played some football out of the portal, and then you grow your high school roster.
Q. Coach, transfer Xzavier McLeod was a standout in your last game against Texas. Can you talk about his development since coming to Georgia from South Carolina.
COACH SMART: Yeah, we had a great relationship with him out of high school. Thought he was a really good athlete. Needed to work on his body. And we ended up losing him to South Carolina. But when he had an opportunity to transfer, he called us up and said, “I’m very interested.” We were very interested. And he’s done a great job. He’s a hard worker, great kid. It helps when you have a relationship with these kids prior, so you know a little more about them, and they’ve been on your campus. And Tray Scott knew his family and had a relationship with him, so that helped. He’s worked tremendously hard. Most players are better in their second year than they are in their first year. And that was the case for him. And if he continues to work hard, he’ll continue to get better.
Q. I hope this doesn’t qualify as a hypothetical, but I want to -- the new rule where players that play JUCO can now get a year back. As far as Colbie Young goes, if he gets everything squared away, do you know if that’s something that he has considered taking advantage of?
COACH SMART: Yeah, Colbie and I have had those discussions. I think only time will tell on that. I’d rather keep those conversations kind of between he and I, because he has a lot of things going on.
Q. Was there any chance that [Carson] Beck could have played -- if he had skipped the surgery, could have played next week or the week after? And secondly, I saw you the other day and I asked you something about how hectic it is in December, and you kind of sighed, especially talking about dealing with the portal and so forth. Say someone had played at a school where it’s very special to have played there. Do you find that loyalty is a hard quality to maintain in a time when players seem to be looking for the next best offer?
COACH SMART: Those are two very different -- I don’t know if I can remember both of those questions. First of all, on Carson [Beck], not that I’m aware of. Carson’s injury was significant and needed to be repaired and fixed, and he did just that. That’s the best thing for his long-term future. And he met with some really good people who have focused on that injury before and made that decision based on his career and his future. As far as the portal and loyalty, look, we’re in a different day and time. Kids are leaving high schools left and right. There’s not a long-term loyalty to programs like there was. I would be remiss if I tried to live in this fantasy world that kids were just going to be loyal to their school. Let’s be honest. The schools make a lot of money off of football programs. That money is then reinvested into all kinds of other athletic programs and, in some cases, in the university. So the football program is the face of most universities; not all, most universities. So the ability to be successful at that is helpful to all the sports teams. So these young men in this room play football because they love it, they care about it. We sell and educate them on this university and how special it is and how great the opportunity they have to play at it. Not everybody is going to be convicted on that and put that before their own individual lifestyles and choices. I’ve accepted that. That doesn’t keep me from still selling it. It doesn’t keep me from still pushing it. Doesn’t keep me from having a culture of buy-in that we’re better together. And the better we do together, the more all of us get accolades. And that’s what we want to push. But I can’t answer for the rest of college football or what everybody else does.
Q. Kirby, you’ve talked about the tough schedule you guys played this year a lot. What effect did you feel like it had on you as a head coach at all, trying to prepare your team for that schedule week after week, staying focused, maybe having a look at the big picture of, This is what we need to do to get to our goals? What was it like through that grind?
COACH SMART: Well, it was more about preparing our team for adversity and accepting that there would be really tough roads. Our team culture was, If you lose a game, the season’s over. And we knew going into this year, it was going to be different. So the prep week-to-week was no different. I don’t prep different for UMass than I do for Texas. The prep is the same. The number of games is the same. What’s different is the expectation that you’re going to go out there and just beat everybody because you’re Georgia and not have tough games, or in our case, have losses. You’ve got to be able to rebound from that and use those losses as growth. And some of the losses we had I think made us better. And we won some games at the end that maybe we don’t win those games if we don’t lose those games earlier. And I think that was the biggest learning tool for our staff, was not to ride that wave of emotion or be worried about outcomes and be focused on what is our end goal and how do we get there.
Q. Kirby, I know you’ve talked about it, but just the grind like that. When you had the incident with the shove of the player, was there anything you learned personally from them that has affected you, how you coach in a game, how you are on the sideline? And did you think at all that the constant grind of a season contributed to anything there?
COACH SMART: No, I don’t think so at all. That was a moment in time that I was trying to get to my strength coach and get to my defensive coordinator and literally ran into a player. I don’t think the season had anything to do with that. That was more of a frustration within a game. I’m a very emotional coach. And like I talked about at that moment, it’s a tough time in a game, when somebody’s driving on you nonstop, we can’t get them off the field. We had the wrong personnel grouping on them, and I’m trying to get to my coordinator. That had nothing to do with the year that we had. I think the year we had had to do with the schedule we had, which is a grind. I think emotionally, you want to try to be under control, make good decisions. I think I always try to do that. There’s times where sometimes your emotion can help the team in terms of energy, if we’re lacking that. And then there’s a time when calmness, coolness takes over and it helps your team. So the more frantic our team is, the more cool I want to be. The less we’re playing good, like UMass, I think I’ve got to show more emotion, because it’s like, What are we doing here? Let’s get going.
