Kirby Smart claims Alabama's best teams of early 2010s 'would beat the dog out of' modern teams

Georgia head coach Kirby Smart has won back-to-back SEC Championships for the first time since his final two seasons as Alabama‘s defensive coordinator in 2014-15. But as the longest-tenured SEC head coach looks back on his time in Tuscaloosa at the start of Nick Saban‘s dynastic run in the early 2010s, even Smart acknowledges the game has changed over the past decade.

In the day and age of NIL and revenue-sharing, where every team can legally pay its players, college football dynasties appear to have gone the way of the dinosaurs — extinct. Be it natural parity or simply a balancing of the talent ledger, the days of a single college football superpower dominating the sport are a thing of the past. And Smart attributes that reality to the fact that teams can no longer hoard elite talent like the Crimson Tide did in the 2010s.

“I tell people all the time, our best Alabama teams – I’m going to go 2012, 13, 14, 15 – would beat the DOG out of all these teams right now,” Smart said Wednesday during an appearance on The Next Round Live following his round at the Regions Tradition Celebrity Pro-Am in Birmingham. “Because they could practice different, and they were deeper. The game has not changed that much since 2012-2025, but the roster has, and those teams would ‘Clubber Lang’ somebody. They would just physically beat you.”

For the younger generation, the “Clubber Lang” reference is a nod to the fictional boxer in the 1982 film Rocky III, played by former pro wrestler-turned-actor Mr. T. And much like Lang, Saban’s early Alabama teams were known for their ability to dominate the opposition through sheer force of superior depth with rosters littered with five- and four-star talent up and down the two-deep.

In 17 seasons under Saban, the Tide went an incredible 201-29 overall with six national championships (2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017, and 2020) and nine SEC titles (2009, 2012, 2014-16, 2018, 2020-21, and 2023). Smart, of course, was a key part of that early success as Saban’s defensive coordinator between 2008-15 before taking over the coaching reins at his alma mater.

Throughout his 18 combined years at Alabama and Georgia, Smart has been a part of eight SEC championship teams and six combined BCS and College Football Playoff national championships. That includes winning back-to-back CFP national titles in 2021-22 at Georgia. But, as Smart acknowledged on Wednesday, dynastic dominance is no longer an option for modern college football teams.

“I look at our team now and I’m like, ‘Aw man, oh God, we don’t have the depth, we’re not as good as we were,’ and then we go out and win the SEC (again),'” Smart continued. “It’s just relative, it’s relative. It’s like everybody’s — I’m not saying going down, because there’s an Indiana, there’s a Michigan — but relative, it’s going down.

“There’s not as much talent acquisition, and as much talent on a (single) team to be able to develop and grow. You’re playing younger players,” Smart concluded. “I’ve got kids (now) that would’ve never played at Georgia when I first got there, or at Alabama when I was there, that are having to play now. You don’t have enough.”