This time a year ago, even those who believed Georgia had needed a new coach wondered if the Bulldogs had bought in haste. To replace Mark Richt, they hired the only guy they interviewed. They hired a Georgia alum who hadn’t been a head coach – and he’d gone 8-5.
A year later, Georgia is readying for the SEC championship game and a place in the College Football Playoff. A year later, nobody asks why Greg McGarity didn’t grab Tom Herman, who in November 2015 was coming off a banner first season with Houston, or Jimbo Fisher, 23 months from leading Florida State to a national title, or Dan Mullen, who’d taken Mississippi State to the 2014 Orange Bowl. A year later, Kirby Smart seems not just the right choice but the only choice.
This isn’t to suggest that Smart, after 25 games, is a fully minted Great Coach. With Tennessee and Florida falling to pieces, it would have been nigh-impossible for Georgia not to win the East. As good as the Bulldogs have been, they’ve really had only two chances to lose. (And lost one.) Smart is not yet Nick Saban. He probably won’t ever be Nick Saban. If he is, he’ll be one of the three best coaches in collegiate history and every Bulldog will have a decade of Merry Christmases.
But enough with the disclaimer. McGarity has gotten from Smart exactly what the athletic director wanted – a coach who would put Georgia in position to win championships. McGarity had decided Richt was no longer that man. That the Bulldogs are prepping to play in Atlanta on the first Saturday in December tells us that Smart was and is that man.
Beyond that, Smart has established a Bulldog baseline: If you’re not here to win everything worth winning, you should be elsewhere. The transition from Richt to Smart – two men who bear little in common beyond five-letter surnames – was more difficult than anyone would have guessed. Such turbulence was, however, necessary. Georgia had to re-educate itself in the ways of championship football, which is the Saban Way, uprooted and replanted as the Smart Way.
After taking the Georgia job, Smart returned to Alabama for the playoff. Before the championship game against Clemson in January 2016, he was asked when he would have his next team playing for championships. He bristled at the question – he does that sometimes – and offered no real answer. On Monday, the same nettlesome reporter (blush) asked if the Bulldogs being positioned to win a championship means his program is on schedule.
“I’ve repeatedly said the same thing,” he said, again looking irked. “There is no schedule for winning championships. ... The objective is to get the most out of every game. At the end of the season, we look back and ask if we did that.”
Then: “Everybody wants to say, ‘This is the schedule.’ There is no schedule. The only thing there is, is what you have. Did you do the best with what you have?”
Georgia is 11-1. Most preseason forecasts had them going 9-3 or 10-2. That would seem to put them, ahem, ahead of schedule. But the reason Saban is Saban is because his teams never hit a dip. (OK, Alabama did go a wretched 10-3 in 2010.) That’s surely the intent here. That’s the reason for recruiting with the hunger of a program starved for talent. That’s the reason Smart persists in his continuing-education forays.
After Ohio State stacked 537 yards on Smart’s Alabama defense in the 2014 playoff semifinal, Smart called Herman – then the Buckeyes’ offensive coordinator – to ask how they’d done it. Last year he commissioned Brian VanGorder, defensive-coordinator-to-the-world, to help prepare for Georgia Tech’s stylized offense. (Didn’t help.) This year he had his Bulldogs work on Tech in increments as the season went along. (Helped.) Smart is the kind of guy you’d hate to have as a teacher but, 10 years later, you’re glad you took his class.
We saw it Saturday at Bobby Dodd Stadium. With Georgia rushing downfield at the end of the half, Isaac Nauta caught a pass and, rather than make for the sideline to stop the clock, sought to make a move and wound up getting tackled inbounds short of a first down. This forced Smart to burn a timeout. Nauta was met at the sideline by his head coach. If you think Smart hates questions about schedules, try depriving him a timeout.
The Georgia program isn’t the warm and fuzzy place it was under Richt, which was kind of the idea. Richt’s Bulldogs never played for a national title; Smart’s bunch could do it in Year 2. Everything here is buttoned down. Player interview availibities are timed to the second. Everything runs on time.
Wait. Not quite everything. Smart was nine minutes late for Monday’s media briefing. He offered an apology and an explanation. “Claude,” he said, speaking of Claude Felton, Georgia’s Hall of Fame publicist, “made me shave.”
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