Kirby Smart restored UGA to prominence. He’ll keep it there

It’s in the East, where the two usual co-contenders will be working under new coaches. Its toughest game – only three or four should be moderately laborious – will come in Athens. Its toughest road game will be in Columbia, S.C., against a program the Bulldogs have, over the past three seasons, beaten by an aggregate 60 points. Its second-toughest will be in Baton Rouge, where Troy won last October.

The reasons not to pick Georgia to go 12-0 are the law of averages and a grasp of history: Since 2011, only one SEC team – Alabama in 2016 – has negotiated a regular season unbeaten. But there’s one good reason to believe Georgia could flout convention.

Kirby Smart.

He might be new to managing expectations in Athens – he archly refers to his playing days, under Ray Goff and Jim Donnan, as “the glory years” – but he’s as steeped in the process as any coach can be. Stop me if you’ve heard this, but he worked under Nick Saban in Tuscaloosa. This is the Nick Saban who, after beating Notre Dame for the BCS title, famously groused: “That damn game cost me a week of recruiting.”

Here’s how many games, per year, Alabama has won since it got good again in 2008 – 12, 14, 10, 12, 13, 11, 12, 14, 14 and 13. Only the 2010 season, the one with the motley 10, can be considered a raging disappointment. (The 11 wins of 2013, which included the Kick Six loss at Auburn, is close.) Bama under Saban simply moves from strength to strength, which is the point of all that recruiting. But Bama remains Bama because the head coach will stand for nothing less.

The great Saban’s longtime aide-de-camp now coaches the SEC team most apt to unseat Bama. Heck, it came close last in the big building with the occasionally retractable roof across the street from where the SEC is staging its Media Days.

Speaking at Tuesday’s session, Smart said he has watched the tape of the blown 13-point lead in January’s national title game. He watched it, which isn’t the same as obsessing over it. “It’s not like I have nightmares,” he said. “It was a learning experience … I don’t look back on it as some horror story.”

Because a new season is almost at hand, with some new players. Three foundational Bulldogs – Roquan Smith, Nick Chubb and Sony Michel – now work in the NFL, but here’s where that manic-in-the-Saban-style recruiting should kick in. As much as freshman quarterback meant to Georgia last season, the new freshman Justin Fields could, over the fullness of time, mean more.

Smart on what’s ahead: “This season for us is going to be simple. It's going to be the measure of potential versus effectiveness … I think potential is dormant ability. And I think effectiveness is what we get out of our potential. And we (tell) our players all the time the pressure is really a privilege. You should feel privileged to have pressure to win games.”

After so many years of being expected to mess up, Georgia has – finally! – reached a higher plane. It won the SEC title. It made the College Football Playoff. It prevailed in a breathless Rose Bowl. It led Alabama by 13 points with 20-1/2 minutes left in regulation, and if the Bulldogs had been playing a different coach – one who wouldn’t have had the gall to change quarterbacks at halftime – they would have been national champs.

There’s a real chance they’ll be national champs soon, though. Saban, who’s 66, can’t coach forever. (Can he?) Smart is 42 and just getting started at his alma mater, which always had the resources to win at the highest level and is now bringing them to bear.

The 2018 Bulldogs won’t be his best group, but sometimes you win it all with a team not quite your best. (Vince Dooley’s 1981 team was maybe better than his 1980 title winners, but it ran afoul of Clemson’s ravenous defense – Buck Belue threw five interceptions; Herschel lost two fumbles – in Death Valley.) With this schedule, which appears even kinder than last season’s, there’s no reason Georgia shouldn’t win the East and put itself in Position A to make the playoff.

Said Smart: “The challenge for us is not to measure this year’s team against last year’s. You guys will probably do that.”

Yeah, we will. Heck, we already have. But if this team plays as close to capacity as last year’s, it will have the same opportunity. And the guy in charge, having seen how Alabama has handled its unprecedented success, is uniquely suited to the mission. “The tendency is to relax,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is relax.”

He was the right guy to orchestrate Georgia’s ascent. He’s the right guy to navigate what’s ahead. Because Kirby Smart never relaxes. Because Nick Saban never does.