USA TODAY International Edition
Bulldogs reap rewards in second year of Smart plan
ATLANTA – The Georgia Bulldogs took the red-eye flight from Los Angeles after its Rose Bowl win against Oklahoma and then hopped on a bus for the drive from here to Athens, leading a caravan of bleary-eyed coaches and players to lean their heads against windows and seat backs to catch even a few minutes of extra sleep before kicking off preparations for the championship game matchup with Alabama.
It was during that drive that cellphones belonging to Georgia’s assistant coaches dinged, beeped and vibrated to life. In a detailed text, Kirby Smart was setting the tone: Here’s what we need to do, he said in his message, here’s what we did wrong against the Sooners and here’s why we can’t ever do that again.
“It was full speed ahead,” said Shane Beamer, the tight ends coach and special teams coordinator.
It’s also par for the course: Since his arrival nearly two years ago, carrying the seal of approval granted by a successful run as Alabama’s defensive coordinator, Smart has worked to install a culture that unsurprisingly mirrors the plan in place with the Crimson Tide.
“Every single day, whether in April, May, June, all you’re worried about is that day,” Beamer said. “You don’t have time to look up. It’s just every day. You look up briefly and put your head back down. It’s very businesslike each and every day.”
The Bulldogs have moved fast, but Georgia didn’t hire Smart expecting mediocrity. The subtle sense of weariness that accompanied the final months of Mark Richt’s tenure — the idea that the Bulldogs had topped out, if at a fairly elite level — was the impetus behind a wholesale shift in culture and direction. Smart knew only one way: the Alabama way. Just as you don’t buy a Ferrari to travel in the right lane, the Bulldogs didn’t bring on Smart to maintain the status quo but to shake up every inch of the program’s foundation.
“Coach Smart, you just looked at his résumé,” wide receiver Trey Blount said. “He came from a great program. He was bringing the things he learned there to our program. We just had to trust him.”
The matchup of teacher and pupil found in the College Football Playoff Championship Game was not in itself predestined long in advance of Monday; there are too many variables and hypotheticals involved in the title race to have predicted an all-Southeastern Conference meeting of the Bulldogs and Tide. But the idea Georgia was headed for this moment seemed inevitable.
“We knew we had the right plan,” tight end Isaac Nauta said. “This is kind of where we expected to be. To me, it’s not a shock that we’re here one bit.”
Georgia always had talent. That’s even ticked up a notch with Smart’s arrival, with successive top-ranked classes bolstering an already impressive array of ability. In theory, the Bulldogs always had as their goal the idea of playing for and winning a national title. But the program needed to be remade, redrawn and refocused. Enter Smart, enter the process, and here come the Bulldogs — not just this season but potentially for the foreseeable future.
“It just feels like destiny,” defensive end Jonathan Ledbetter said.
But it didn’t happen overnight, mirroring in another way how Saban built Alabama into perhaps the greatest dynasty in the sport’s history. Saban finished with seven wins in his debut, long ago in 2007, before the Crimson Tide ascended to center stage a year later. Smart’s first team won eight games, capped by an important bowl win against TCU, and then rocketed into the championship game in 2017.
There was no set turning point for Georgia, only the slow and steady absorption of a new standard. The Bulldogs soaked up lessons through osmosis: how to train, how to study, how to practice and how to translate instruction into on-field results.
Ascending to the top of the FBS means getting past Alabama, and not just once. Georgia isn’t the first team to take aim at the Tide — many have tried and some succeeded, such as Clemson, while others have failed to tackle college football’s ultimate test.
Georgia represents a different sort of challenger, one with not only every advantage inherent to Alabama but a style built upon a series of schematics and blueprints taken right from the source.
The feeling at Georgia is that a powerhouse in its infancy is close to reaching maturity, perhaps as soon as 60 minutes after kickoff against the Tide.
“From here, we’ve got to keep raising the bar,” Nauta said. “That’s what we want to do as a program. I’m excited to end this year strong and for the future.”