Georgia made rapid gains in Smart’s 2nd season
To hear Kirby Smart tell it, he has never really considered whether, in his second season as Georgia’s coach, the Bulldogs are ahead of schedule — although reaching the College Football Playoff national championship game is a pretty good indicator of rapid progress.
“We look at every year independent of the previous,” Smart said. “Our job is to get the best out of our team, our university, our kids each year. We’re trying to get the best out of this group that we can get. That’s all we think about.”
If Smart’s answer is reminiscent of someone familiar, there’s reason. He was Nick Saban’s understudy for years before taking the head coaching position at his alma mater. Georgia was 8-5 in 2016, Smart’s first season. This year? The SEC champion Bulldogs are 13-1. On Monday, they’ll face Saban and Alabama with a national title at stake.
Smart, 42, is one of five finalists for the American Football Coaches Association’s 2017 National Coach of the Year award. He joins Iowa State’s Matt Campbell, Wisconsin’s Paul Chryst, Fresno State’s Jeff Tedford and Scott Frost, formerly of UCF, as regional winners. The national award will be announced at the American Football Coaches Awards presented by Amway.
Smart inherited a talented roster from Mark Richt, but he implemented cultural changes in the program — with- out apology, he mimicked what he’d learned and done for Saban and Alabama.
Along with that is intense focus on immediate details — and every detail — and that doesn’t include forecasting year-by-year progress.
“We don’t really look at it (like), ‘Are we where we need to be in year two? Are we where we need to be in year three?’ ” Smart said. “We just want to get the best out of each team that we have. And every team is different.”
But in year two, the Bulldogs were very, very good — much better than in Smart’s first year, and better in fact than Georgia has been in a very long time. If the Bulldogs are ahead of schedule, their head coach won’t acknowledge it. Instead, he credited the Bulldogs’ senior leadership and the team’s overall grit.
“Our kids are so resilient,” Smart said in the moments after Georgia’s 54-48, double-overtime victory against Oklahoma in a Rose Bowl semifinal. “They never stopped chopping wood. They kept fighting. They believed.”
He meant in finding a way to beat the Sooners. But it’s also partly how the program has been so quickly built to elite status.