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Chris Low, ESPN Senior Writer
ATHENS, Ga. — When Kirby Smart returned to his alma mater in 2016, there was no ambiguity about his mission as Georgia‘s football coach.
He wasn’t there to restore Georgia to annual top 25 status or to average 10 wins a season or even to end the Bulldogs’ SEC championship drought. He was there to win national championships.
In eight seasons under Smart, Georgia has won two CFP titles, played for a third and won 13 or more games in each of the past three seasons.
Now that Nick Saban has retired, Smart is unquestionably tops among college football coaches, and his program is the envy of the sport. The Bulldogs are the only team to have finished in the top seven in the final AP poll in each of the past seven seasons. The only season they didn’t under Smart was his first as coach in 2016. And with Saban gone, Smart is unbeaten against all active head coaches over the past five seasons.
Much like his former boss, Smart isn’t too keen on talking about the past. His team won an SEC-record 29 straight games before losing to Alabama in the conference championship game last season and missing the College Football Playoff. That gut-wrenching 27-24 loss ended Georgia’s quest to become the first team since Minnesota in 1934 to 1936 to win three straight national championships.
The Bulldogs are in the middle of their ninth spring practice under Smart, and he sat down with ESPN to discuss everything from his mindset coming off last year’s near miss at history, his approach to fighting complacency, his take on the identity of this year’s Georgia team, his feelings about facing Alabama without Saban and the ever-changing landscape of college football.
ESPN: As you walked off the field last season in Atlanta following the loss to Alabama, did you think there was still a chance you might get into the playoff?
Smart: I don’t know. I hoped. I know we should have, that we were one of the best four teams, so I hoped there was a way. I guess deep down, I knew we probably weren’t, though, with everything set up the way it was. We had our chance to take it out of the committee’s hands and didn’t get it done.
ESPN: What were your emotions that next day watching the selection show when the realization set in that you weren’t going to be playing for a third national championship?
Smart: It was still hard swallowing the pill that you weren’t in and had accomplished all we did as a team. But once I swallowed it, I moved on, and our team moved on. That’s the way we’ve always operated around here. You focus on what’s in front of you and get better. You don’t sit around and mope about what might have been or should have been.
ESPN: Bowl games have become a season unto themselves, especially with all the opt-outs among players, but what did it say about your program the way you bounced back from the SEC championship game disappointment and decimated Florida State 63-3 in the Orange Bowl with most of your key players electing to play?
Smart: I was proud of our guys, proud of the way our season finished because of our response against Florida State. That made it much easier for me. It made me realize this huge investment we put into the culture of our team, the love we had for each other. The loss to Alabama, as bad as it was, gave us an opportunity to shine this light, ‘That you know what, these bowl games matter, winning matters, finishing matters.’ Our kids showed the kind of competitive character we pride ourselves on. They stuck around and finished the job.”
ESPN: What will it be like when you go to Tuscaloosa on Sept. 28 and don’t see Nick Saban standing on the Alabama sideline?
Smart: I’d say different for a lot of people. But for me, I love the man. I appreciate all he’s done, and I enjoyed competing against him. I wish he was still around, so that I could get some more shots at him because I hadn’t done real well against him (1-5). We’ve had some really close games, some really great games. But, yeah, I wish he was still there.
ESPN: Does it eat at you even more that you coached so long under Saban, and now all of a sudden, you don’t get any more chances to beat him?
Smart: I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I think if I had never coached under him, I would probably be more frustrated because it would be like, ‘Man, I never got to beat the GOAT as much as I wanted to or whatever.’ But with him, there’s so much respect having worked for him that I’m happy for him that he’s chosen to do what he wants to do. He deserves to go out how he wanted to.
ESPN: What did you tell Saban when you met him at midfield after last season’s SEC championship game?
Smart: I just said, ‘Look, I appreciate all you’ve done for me and my career. You’re one of the best to ever do it, and I have immense respect for you.’ And then I joked with him. ‘You can’t keep doing this much longer.’
ESPN: How will expanding from four to 12 teams in 2024 change the dynamic of the playoff?
Smart: It keeps your hopes alive with one loss, maybe two. A lot of coaches have complained that once they lost a game, their kids just said that they were done. There won’t be as much of that. Everybody’s fighting for the same thing, and that’s the beauty of making those last three or four weeks really, really eventful. I know some people say, ‘It devalues the late-season games because you’ll know you’re in.’ Well, there will be more people in the hunt now. So there will be a lot of meaningful games. That team with two losses late in the year that has played a tough schedule is going to be fighting and scratching to earn that 12th spot.
ESPN: What do you not like about the new playoff format?
Smart: The idea of the SEC championship loser, who just fought their ass off to be the second-place team in the best conference in the world, having to turn around and play maybe two weeks later with no bye. If you go through our conference undefeated like we did last year and lose to a team in the SEC championship game, you’re going to lose your bye and go play as a 5 seed somewhere? That’s crazy.
ESPN: What’s the secret to not getting complacent after playing for and/or winning an SEC title or national title in six of the past seven seasons?
Smart: It’s like elasticity. If you have a rubber band and you keep stretching and you stretch it and you stretch it, eventually it loses its constriction and it’s just loose. I tell our guys all the time, ‘We’re going to stretch you every day, every day to where you’re really comfortable being uncomfortable. We’re going to make you uncomfortable at practice.’ Guys will come up to me and tell me they can’t make it through practice. Our practices are more intense than games, and that’s purposeful because I feel like it gives your team the ability to sustain the season. To get up for every game, you have to get up for every practice. If you don’t, that’s when you get your ass beat.
ESPN: One of your strengths at Georgia has been finding coveted recruits who thrive on competition, as evidenced by the 55 NFL draft picks, including 15 first-rounders, you’ve produced. How hard is it to find that combination?
Smart: I think that’s what has made us different. We do a really thorough job of evaluating. We still think our evaluation matters and not the star system. It’s easy to get lazy and not evaluate the right things. We’ve passed on some kids that we didn’t think were the right fit, and then we’ve gotten kids that weren’t good fits and they left. So there’s a lot of pressure in this organization to squeeze out the uncompetitive.
ESPN: What’s one of the things that has gotten your attention about this team through the first part of spring practice?
Smart: Either we’re maybe a little weaker on the defensive line or we’re really good on the offensive line. The glaring thing I’ve seen at practices is that the offensive line has done a really good job. That’s not to say we were subpar on the defensive line last year. We just weren’t great. We didn’t have a dominant guy, but we’re always going to be good on defense. I don’t know that we’re going to be great this year, but I think we have a chance to be great on offense.
ESPN: What’s it been like to watch Carson Beck‘s transformation at quarterback from a year ago when he was competing for the starting job to where he is now as a preseason Heisman Trophy candidate?
Smart: He’s ‘Mr. Mellow’ out there. The guys in the locker room love him because he’s confident, calm and very smart. Even though he’s got a little bit of arrogance to him, he’s not holier than thou like you see with some quarterbacks. Early in the year last season, we probably did try to protect him too much. But then you see nothing ever really affects him and know you’ve just got to let the cat go play because we were either going to make it or not make it on his back. As the year went on, he got better and better, but we were probably a little too slow with him out of the gate.
ESPN: How would you characterize the makeup and identity of this team to this point?
Smart: We have a lot of older players. I’m talking about fifth- and sixth-year guys, more than I’ve ever had. And then I’ve got a super young team. So it’s like I’ve got two teams I’m dealing with all the time, the old head who stayed for the NIL and the young guy who is talented as hell and doesn’t know how far he has to go. I’m constantly trying to navigate my practices where I don’t kill the old head, but I bring the young player up.
ESPN: What are the challenges of having that gap between veterans and younger players?
Smart: It’s sort of been that way for the last three years. You’re always trying to shape your team to be deep and physical. I watch all these NCAA tournament basketball games, and I’m like, ‘Damn, how does a Yale beat Auburn?’ But it’s so different in basketball, man. It’s so different because any given five guys can beat the other five guys, whether they’re old, young or you’re just buying a couple of great players. That ain’t our game. Our game is the line of scrimmage. If you’ve got five 300-pounders, they’re not going to lose to a team that has four defensive linemen in their 250s. They’re going to destroy them.
ESPN: What was your reaction to the SEC sticking with the same conference opponents in 2025, flipping the venues and not starting all over again?
Smart: Me, personally, I liked it. I just got one of the toughest road schedules in the country (in 2024). I’d like to see it flipped where I got the opportunity for our fan base to have probably the best home schedule ever in Georgia history (Alabama, Kentucky, Ole Miss and Texas).
ESPN: Do you foresee the SEC going to nine conference games in 2026?
Smart: Let’s see where we are then and how it plays out. There were several options presented with the 2025 schedule. One of the more interesting questions is what the CFP becomes, and we’ll probably have a better feel when we see how many teams are going to be in the playoff in 2026 whether it makes sense to go to nine conference games. Obviously, television is going to have something to do with it, but we’ve almost always played two Power 5 teams in our nonconference schedule (Clemson and Georgia Tech in 2024).
ESPN: Only five SEC coaches have won national championships at their alma maters, and the 2021 title was the first for Georgia in 41 years. As a player, assistant coach and now head coach at Georgia, how much does that mean to you?
Smart: I was brought here to win championships, but the thing I’m proudest of has been the consistency. I look back on Year 1 (8-5) as a failure and not the standard, but every year after that we’ve been right there. Nobody else over that span can say they’ve finished in the top seven at the very end for seven straight years. You can’t find it, not even at Alabama. We missed the damn playoff three times by being No. 5 or No. 6, so those are missed at-bats we would have had in this 12-team playoff. We’ve been relevant every year but that first one. But I want more than relevance. I want dominance, and we’ve been more dominant in the last three years. What I don’t want are the ebbs and flows or the one-hit wonders you see out there. I don’t want any player to leave Georgia without a championship.