Kirby Smart's comments ahead of G-Day
As Georgia prepares for its annual G-Day spring game, Kirby Smart did not meet with the beat media this week. Instead, he sat down with 680TheFan for 19 minutes on Tuesday, during which he spoke about several topics related to his program and college football as a whole.
Here are the full comments from the Georgia head coach:
On being 11 years into the job…
“Eleven years. I had no idea. It’s just, yeah, it does start running together. I mean, year stack, day stack. Somebody said the days are long, but the years are short, however it goes. There’s a lot of merit to that because I look around my office at pictures, and I keep thinking we need to update those because my kids are no longer little kids. They’re, you know, my twins are going off to college, and I’m like, college is pictures of them being babies, and it flies. No question about that.”
On higher expectations for this year for Georgia…
“I’m going to be honest with you. They can’t get higher than high. So, it makes for a great story, but I love it when they say expectations are higher this year. Hell, the expectations are higher every year, and they should be. We got good football players. We got good coaches. I don’t measure our success and failure just on outcomes of games. I look at it in terms of development and production, and what kind of human beings you’re putting out, but whatever you guys need to say to make it work, I’m good with it because expectations are always higher, and they should be.”
On whether someone will have higher expectations than him…
“I don’t know. Some people probably got higher expectations than I do. I just have an expectation to win every game and to be the very best we can possibly be, and that’s simple. I mean, I learned that from Nick [Saban] a long time ago. I don’t get caught up in all that stuff like the fact we won two in a row. That was awesome. That was amazing. Why didn’t we win more since then? Because somebody else was better than us, or somebody else did a better job than us. Either one, but our job is to do the best job we can possibly do this year and then see where we fall.”
On improving his team…
“Yeah, I think you’re always trying to improve. You improve what you do and what you do from a standpoint of practice habits, growth in the players, but ultimately to improve your team, you have to go through a recruiting process or the portal, right? So the only way to improve your roster or even go through changes on your staff. So you’re trying to upgrade something.
“In season, I think you’re just trying to improve your players. You can’t really change your players in season, right? You can’t change who they are. You need to play this guy. You need to play that guy. We’re playing the best guys. We’ve never been accused of not playing the best players that give us a chance to win.
“So in season, how do I look at it? Okay, how do we get better? What can we do, maybe that somebody else is doing schematically to steal it down or steal a play to produce better? But you can’t, you can make monumental changes, and you can really change fast nowadays because of the portal and because of the ability to go out and spend. But that hasn’t been our MO. Our MO has been recruit and develop high school football players, be the best coaching staff you can put out there, have continuity and retention, which we’ve had a ton of continuity and retention, and then go do it better than other people.”
On Gunner Stockton…
“I think Gunner would be the first to tell you he wants to be more efficient. He wants to be more explosive. That comes with having explosive playmakers around him. That comes with having an offensive line that gives him time to do it. That comes with his legs, which he did last year, and had explosive plays through his legs. It’s just all around how do we become more explosive and how do we become a better turnover machine on defense, because ultimately, you want to be really good on offense, you need to be good on defense. They complement each other. So him specifically, there’s all kinds of things he can do to get better, but it revolves around a lot of guys doing things around him better.”
On Steve Smith’s criticisms of Gunner Stockton…
“Do your homework. Do a little more homework. I think if you look at small sections of it, there’s things he can do better. You look at the total body of work he has, it’s been really good. I think it’s only going to get better with experience. I don’t really know Steve Smith personally. I got nothing to respond to him. I don’t really worry about what he says. I worry about do we win football games and do we produce?
“When I look at the stats, I say, ‘Who has the most wide receivers drafted in the last seven drafts?’ There’s only one team in the country that has more wide receivers drafted than us over seven years. That’s a pretty good stat. When you throw in tight ends, pass catchers, we’re first over seven years. That’s not a bad thing. When you look at passing in the SEC over five years, and I think you can only look across your conference, we’re top two passing over five years in our conference.
“There’s multiple quarterbacks in that. That’s a Stetson, Carson, Gunner era, but when you’re top two in something in the SEC, that’s pretty good. People look past a lot of things, and they’re going to judge Gunner based on a throw or a play. Judge him based on his toughness, his intangibles, the throws he does make.”
On being talked about nationally…
“I don’t even know that that’s a national story, to be honest with you. I don’t even know that he’s talking about us because we’re at the top. That’s just his job, right? He needs clickbait. He needs links. He needs likes. He needs all those things. How do you get it? You make comments like that about players and guys in the draft. That’s his job. Much respect. You got your opinion. You got to form your opinions, but we’ll have ours within this building. We have conviction about Gunner. We have conviction about the other players on our team. Our job is to go out there and put a good product on the field.”
On having preseason scrimmages versus other teams…
“Yeah, I don’t foresee it happening more from a cost basis. I mean, every athletic department right now is trying to figure out how they’re going to breathe, how they’re going to pay for, as we look on the screen, gymnastics and women’s basketball and equestrian and track and field. How are they going to fund it and pay for it? And they’re looking for revenue streams. And if that’s a new revenue stream, then there’s a possibility of it. But I also don’t know that we’re looking to prolong the season or have preseason games that require, I don’t know if you’re referring to spring games or fall extra scrimmage.”
On playing another team in spring…
“Yeah, I think there’s an inherent cost in that. And it’s like, okay, who’s traveling? Who’s paying for that travel? Are we selling tickets? Are we trying to turn it into a money stream, a stream of revenue, which every athletic department needs right now more than ever. And I think all that’s coming to a head. And it worries me for, I am a college sports enthusiast. I love going to a tennis match, a baseball game, a softball game, and seeing those.I don’t want those sports hindered by the inability to have revenue because of spending in other areas.”
On playing a preseason game…
“I don’t know because I do that anyway. I do it against a pretty good team. Ours. So I enjoy that. I don’t know that I would love to move ours up and say, okay, in this place of this preseason game, let’s call this week zero, and we start scheduling there. So we’re not playing January 25th or 26th. You know, I want to move it up and get it done quicker because I do think teams are more prepared to play earlier than they’ve ever been. I mean, we’re living in the day and age of when people didn’t even go to summer school, and you needed summer fall camp to get ready. We got our kids here all summer. They’re here year-round. They’re ready to play in August after we’ve done eight million walkthroughs and practices and things like that. So I would be for moving it up, but not necessarily having a game that’s a preseason game. I want my controlled scrimmage that I can say, what do we need to work on? Not necessarily go play a game.”
On the SEC Championship…
“I think everybody’s entitled to their opinion, too. So I don’t really care what other people think. They asked me what I think. I love the game. I think the game is about the footprint of our conference, and it’s the greatest football states in the world. And, you know, there’s a lot of passion and energy among those schools. And, you know, is there a time that I could say the SEC championship might not be there? Yeah, absolutely. It could be headed towards that. But I love the game. I love the championship factor. I love the fact that I didn’t win one as a player, and I got to be watch and be a part of a ton of them at Alabama. I think it’s a it’s great for the student athlete is the way I look at it.I don’t look at it any other way than just saying that if it makes for a longer season and we can shorten the season, then there’s possibilities around that. But I don’t really care what other people think about how I think about it. I only care how I think about it.”
On not listening to the outside noise…
“Yeah, I don’t listen to outside noise. I don’t have time. I’m trying to figure out, you know, who’s going to be the this guy, that guy, what position they’re going to play, who we’re going to recruit, who we’re going to sign, not to mention making a decision on practice habits and what we’re doing every day. I don’t pay one bit of attention to the outside. I don’t have time to.”
On whether the job is harder now compared to 11 years ago…
“So it was difficult when I got it because I had run it. So there was nine million nuggets that I knew nothing about that. I had to go answer to an uncomfortable, much more comfortable now. But the challenge of being a new coach now, I can’t even fathom because the amount of buckets you got to fill are exponentially larger than when I took the job. But I also was completely not prepared for some of the things you have to make decisions on, because when you’re not a head coach before your first time doing it, and you do it at Georgia, there’s a lot more things you got to think about than just who’s the defensive coordinator. So it’s changed a lot and it’s definitely tougher now than it was. But it’s also I have more experience now, so more prepared.”
On if things with NIL and the transfer portal are moving faster now…
“It’s actually like where I mean, it’s at the pace that it’s been the last two to three years to me. So it’s like, OK, this is the month for this. This is the month for this. With there being no spring portal for us, it’s actually brought some sanity to your roster being your roster. Now, that can be positive, and that can be negative because there’s a lot of coaches out there that would love to.
“Oh, man, I’d love to get this guy or get that guy, or kids would like to move. But now that you’re fixed, it puts a little more pressure on. Can you get your roster better than their roster? Can you improve your kids more than they improve their kids? Because you can’t go out and change kids now. So you got to take your roster and develop them. That’s very different than the NFL model of free agency. And I got to change this guy. And you know what? If this guy ain’t working out, I’ll just trade to get this guy. There’s none of that. Your roster is your roster. Who does the best job with their rosters?”
On high school kids being at a disadvantage now with the portal…
“I hate it for them. But I also love it for the fact that the players are getting an opportunity financially. They’ve never gotten before. Right. They’re seizing those opportunities with those opportunities. They’re being reduced at the high school level because the recipe for winning it, the recipe for winning in most cases, y’all do the numbers better than me. But I don’t know what the final four teams for the last three years or since the playoff started has been a large contingency of portal programs. So the model says go portal. Don’t go high school. And it has impacted high school athletes. And I like to think in our state, it’s allowed us to be selective and go pick the best high school players that you want to try to get to bring into your program because more and more people are not taking high school kids.”
On senior day…
“Senior day is not the same. It’s not the same as it’s been. Now, you have a small portion. There’s five, six kids every year we go out there that have been here throughout, stayed throughout. When you go to other programs, that’s like a dinosaur. I mean, kids just don’t stay and stay the whole time. We’re very fortunate that we actually have a real senior day for, I don’t know, half our guys. But the other half might have done senior day somewhere else. The hard thing now is even with the COVID, we had multiple kids that had three senior days. You know, it’s like, what does this thing even mean anymore?”
On speeding and driving…
“We’re in constant pursuit of perfection with our kids. And that’s an area we’ll never reach. They will never be perfect. They will never be angels. They never were when I was here. There’s never been a perfect team that didn’t have kids that make mistakes. We try to prevent the same mistake. And you would think it’s as simple as just telling them, right? No. It does not work that way. There’s nobody in the country, and I’ve asked everybody in the country, that does a mandatory defensive driving course every year. And it requires players that don’t have a driver’s license to take six hours with someone riding around with them to teach them how to drive. Because, unfortunately, we have kids that come in here every year that have never driven. And they’ll be first-time drivers at 18, 19 years old. And we want to educate them and help them with that. You can’t. You know, a lot of places can’t mandate that you have to do that. We do. And we do because of our history. That doesn’t make it perfect. But we’re certainly in a constant pursuit of perfection.”
If athletes understand what they do is going to be public…
“Yeah, I think they’re held to a different standard, but they also get treated to a different standard in terms of their pay, in terms of the opportunity they have. So it’s a two-way street. But do we do it because we know the consequences for them? No, we do it because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the right thing to do to help kids that haven’t driven or make mistakes, to discipline them. Those are all things we do. We do it because it’s right, not because we’re trying to check a box.”
On determining the day-to-day needs for practice…
“Well, it changes. It changes based on what we have, right? So, like, every day I’m thinking, like, okay, we’ve got to have a really good practice today, physical practice today. We’ve got to focus on throwing and catching the ball. Like every team needs something different. Where are we old at and where are we young at? So we’ve really tried to emphasize, because our wide receivers are young for the most part, we’ve tried to emphasize some periods that put pressure on them, game-like situations, where last year, you know, we probably got four wide receivers when we got drafted. So when you’ve got four wide receivers when you get drafted, you probably better be working on some other area. And that’s been the focus this year is, like, where do we need the most help in our practice time?”