Smart has done exactly what he was hired to do
Mark Richt had quite a run as the head football coach at the University of Georgia. His teams won multiple SEC championships, played in premier bowl games routinely, recruited high school talent at a high level and were consistently near the top of the polls.
Richt is still revered and respected by a large majority of Bulldog fans, but — and you knew there was a but coming — his Georgia teams always seemed to come up just short of the ultimate goal of winning a national title. It might’ve just been bad luck or bad breaks or running into better-coached or more talented teams, or simply not being able to win in the biggest moments, or whatever reason you attribute it to.
So, after the 2015 season, the university decided to part ways with the veteran coach. It definitely drew some criticism at the time, with many fans not agreeing with the decision.
Then, Kirby Smart came aboard. His mission was to take the already great program that Richt and many others before him had established and make it “elite.” In fact, one of Smart’s notorious lines since taking over in Athens is “You’re either elite or your not.”
Well, folks, the Bulldogs are elite. Simple as that.
It may have taken Smart a few years of knocking at the door, but Georgia has busted right through it in the last two years. All those near-misses at championship opportunities in the Richt years, and even early in the Smart years, are a distant memory now.
The Bulldog fan base not only got to celebrate a national championship to break its 41-year drought, but it’s now celebrating back-to-back national championships — the first to get to do that in the College Football Playoff era.
And the most recent one was in the most dominant fashion anyone has ever won a championship game as the Bulldogs demolished TCU 65-7 in Monday’s title game at SoFi Stadium. They did anything and everything they wanted on that field, and the Horned Frogs couldn’t do a single thing to provide any resistance.
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So the question now is, what’s next? Well, on paper, the train should keep rolling down the tracks with no end in sight. The way Smart has stacked top recruiting class after top recruiting class, Georgia is now in the same cycle that Alabama was (and may still be) for many years, where they don’t rebuild, they reload.
Take this past season for example. The Bulldogs lost 15 players to the 2022 NFL draft following
last year’s championship run.
No sweat. They turned around and went 15-0, en route to a second straight national title.
They will certainly lose their share of talent again to the next level in the upcoming NFL draft, but Smart will just replace those guys with more four- and fivestar players like nothing changed.
Here is the one thing a dominant team on a run like Georgia has been on the last couple years has to worry about — it’s a word called complacency. The great coaches have been able to find a way to combat it and keep their teams at the mountaintop,
whether it was Nick Saban or Bill Belichick or Steve Kerr or Phil Jackson or Geno Auriemma or Pat Summitt or Red Aeurbach, or whatever all-time great leader you want to name. They all found ways to motivate their teams to not be satisfied and keep working harder than anyone else.
Can Smart do the same? Only time will tell. But if you listen to anything he says or have noticed how he goes about his business, it’s hard to imagine anyone under his direction becoming complacent.
The other side of that coin is that college football as a whole is not going to lay down. Once a
team gets to the top, they become the marked man, and everyone is hunting them. That should provide motivation in itself.
With all that said, Georgia fans, you better enjoy this as much as you can. Championship celebrations do not happen often, and multiple championships or “dynasties” are even more rare.
But Smart was brought to Georgia to take the program to the next level, and that’s exactly what he has done.