Why Georgia hasn't slipped amid college football's changes — it starts with Kirby Smart
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Seth Emerson
Eleven months ago, Smart’s program seemed to be falling back to the pack. Now, it's a championship favorite.
Kirby Smart’s first college coaching stop was at tiny Valdosta State back in 2000. The team’s strength and conditioning coach was Michael Doscher, who was asked two decades later what Smart was like then, which may have foretold what he would become. Doscher thought for a couple beats, then answered.
“He was humble,” Doscher said.
Valdosta State was a budding cradle of future big-time head coaches — Hal Mumme, Mike Leach, Dana Holgorsen, Will Muschamp — and they all had some “it factor” about them. And for the 22-year-old Smart, fresh off an All-SEC playing career, it was the way he carried himself.
“Kirby was a little more personable about it, more friendly and had that way about him,” Doscher said.
Maybe it’s hard to consider the current Smart — the 10th-year Georgia coach who rants and rails on the sideline, who has six national title rings as a head coach and defensive coordinator — as humble. Yet, it’s also a bit of the secret sauce.
It was for Nick Saban, the man who hired Smart away from Valdosta State and into his vortex, and is now off the stage — essentially replaced by Smart as the accepted best coach in the sport. And while they’re not the same person or coach, the reason they got to the top and stayed there may be the same: The flexibility to adjust when the world around them changes.
Saban, the defensive mastermind and offensive traditionalist, adjusted late in his career to the up-tempo, passing revolution. Smart made the same adjustment, but also to changes in the sport: unlimited transferring, paying players, the flattening of the talent pool such that the Georgias and Alabamas can’t hoard talent like the old days.
Eleven months ago, Smart’s program seemed to be falling back to the pack. The Dawgs were soundly beaten by Notre Dame in the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoff, ending a season that had an SEC championship, but also three losses and more close calls. When it ended, Smart declined to make any changes to his coaching staff, to the concern of many in Georgia’s fan base.
And a month into this season, Georgia suffered its first home loss in six years and needed the help of a missed field goal to win at Tennessee. The Dawgs didn’t look like a great team anymore.
Now here they are: SEC champions again. Playing their best ball going into the Playoff, one of three betting co-favorites to win the national title. The Playoff could always re-ignite questions. However, right now, entering Thursday’s Sugar Bowl tilt against Ole Miss, Georgia as an elite program seems inevitable, for a simple reason: The head coach knows what he’s doing.
Staff management
Some saw it as stubbornness. Smart saw it as stability.
Georgia was coming off a rough offensive season in 2024, especially in blocking. Quarterback Carson Beck regressed, receivers dropped passes and there was almost no running game. That was despite three offensive linemen being good enough to be drafted in the first three rounds of the NFL Draft.
And yet Smart opted to bring back offensive line coach Stacy Searals and offensive coordinator Mike Bobo, who was Smart’s college teammate and close friend. To the critics, Smart was allowing personal relationships to cloud his professional thinking. To Smart, he was counting on two veteran coaches with longer track records.
“We’ve built our program around retention,” Smart said in the spring. “I think we’ve got the most stable, not only staff, but stable organization in all of college football. I think that’s what we’ve hung our hat on, is we have stability. We have retention. We have a great foundation. We’re built to last.”
And built, it turns out, to validate Smart’s gamble.
Gunner Stockton and the Georgia offense have soared this season, validating Kirby Smart’s bet on continuity. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
Georgia’s offense may be the reason it made the Playoff, winning early-season shootouts against Tennessee (44-41) and Ole Miss (43-35). New quarterback Gunner Stockton ended up seventh in the Heisman Trophy voting. The running game was a strength. Bobo was named a finalist for the Broyles Award, which goes to the nation’s top assistant.
The defense was realistically the bigger worry until late in the season, when the old Georgia defense showed up again, smothering Texas, Georgia Tech and Alabama.
Still, it goes further than that: Georgia’s special teams have always been an underrated strength, and Smart has put Kirk Benedict in charge of that for several years.
And off the field, the longtime guiding force remains Scott Sinclair, who has been the strength and conditioning coordinator throughout Smart’s tenure. The two are wrapping up their 10th season together.
“This league will chew you up and spit you out,” Smart said, mentioning how other teams have player and coaching turnover, while his program is among the best at retention. “I take a lot of pride in that, and I think that’s one of our weapons.”
Smart in charge (still, with help)
Georgia’s talent advantage isn’t what it was in the pre-2021 days, when unlimited transferring and NIL arrived. The Bulldogs no longer can stow blue-chip recruits on their bench for a few years, then unleash them as starters. It has been a hit to the team’s depth, and occasionally left weak spots on the field.
The program, nonetheless, has also managed it well enough that it still has plenty of talent. Georgia signed 21 of its 24 starters in the SEC championship in one of its past four recruiting classes, all of which ranked in the top three nationally.
And when the program badly needed a difference-making receiver, it got him via the transfer portal. USC’s Zachariah Branch has become such a focal point of the offense that with 73 catches, he’s four away from setting Georgia’s single-season record.
In an age when many programs are hiring a general manager, Georgia already has one: Smart. He has always been the de facto GM, the one in charge of roster procurement. There isn’t a person in charge of it who reports to Smart. There is a football chief of staff — Mark Robinson — and director of player personnel — Will Myers. Still, as the portal and NIL became prominent, Georgia didn’t have to expand its personnel staff. It was already pretty robust.
“We’ve got a lot of people in charge of roster management, including myself, including our football office staff (who) are involved,” Smart said. “Our operations slash player development, player personnel staff, everybody gets involved in that.”
This was what Saban did: He revolutionized college football coaching at Alabama in the late 2000s by hiring analysts, which critics pilloried as staff-bloating, but it was Saban who wanted extra eyes on his team and extra hands in recruiting. Saban was not arrogant enough to think he could do everything.
That’s the formula for Smart in this era: Lots of eyes, ears and mouths involved, then he makes the final call.
“It’s a team effort,” Smart said. “We reorganize and restructure some things in terms of what falls under whose duty and whose aspects. But at the end of the day, I’m not ready to run off and go hire somebody that’s just going to make all the decisions for what goes on the football field. I think I’ve got to stay involved in that heavily. We’ve got the capacity and the quality of people in the areas that I think we need.”
Georgia’s 117 wins since Kirby Smart took over in 2016 are second-most in the country behind only Alabama’s 121. (Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)
Internal culture in the age of NIL and the portal
Georgia has dealt with too many bad headlines over the last few years, with a couple dozen players arrested since the January 2023 car crash that killed a player and staff member. However, Georgia people — administrators, staffers, players — put those issues in a separate category from what they see as a strong internal culture. There is a dichotomy: Players getting in legal trouble is something Smart has had to handle, adjusting his level and manner of punishment. Yet, when it comes to team-building and chemistry in the age of NIL and the portal, not much has changed.
“NIL hasn’t impacted what we’ve been doing,” said Drew Brannon, a sports psychologist who has worked with Georgia since 2018, especially starting with the 2021 national championship season. “The things we’ve built in terms of program DNA have certainly had a positive impact given the ramifications of NIL, but we haven’t done things differently due to NIL, portal, etc.”
Georgia has been practicing skull sessions — when players in small or large groups discuss personal issues or desires — since 2021. Smart has also given Brannon the floor to introduce motivational exercises, such as before the second national championship, using the Netflix and Blockbuster story.
There have been some challenges, especially last year, when players said the connection among teammates, especially on offense, wasn’t as strong. Still, there was also optimism from existing players about the returning 2025 core.
“I’ve got a lot of faith in them,” linebacker Smael Mondon said last February. “They’ve got a good leadership class, and I feel really good about it.”
That’s been borne out. The quarterback change also helped. Beck was quieter and on his own, while Stockton’s personality and playing style endeared him to teammates. Teams often feed off the personality of their quarterbacks. This year’s team pulled off comeback wins over Tennessee, Auburn, Ole Miss and Florida — and it did that last year too. This time, though, it improved as the season continued and looks much better heading into the CFP.
“We do our best to enhance our efforts each year with tweaks, but the fundamentals don’t change, and I think that has a lot to do with why our players and staff don’t flinch when they encounter challenging situations,” Brannon said. “Coach Smart does an incredible job of modeling this from the top, which is what you see in the highest-performing organizations in the world.”
