Georgia coach Kirby Smart directed back-to-back national championships that culminated with the 65-7 victory over TCU in the College Football Playoff title game Monday night.
Here are several questions posed to Smart in his postgame press availability:
Q: You’ve mentioned not taking things for granted. And I know several players and yourself said that people doubted you this year. Now you’ll go into a year where you’ll probably be No. 1 across the board. What’s the biggest challenge for this program, and I know you don’t want to talk about a three-peat, but going for that next one?
A: The biggest challenge is the same as in the world we live in today, the society we live in – entitlement. The minute you think you’re entitled to winning games and you don’t have to work hard. (TCU) Coach (Sonny) Dykes and I were talking about it; the uphill battle for those guys is you think that you just inherit success. And I personally think next year is going to be a much more difficult challenge over this year because we had so many guys leaving last year. We got a lot of guys coming back.
Q: You called the timeout when Stetson (Bennett) was coming out. You called a timeout on defense as well when those guys came out. Why was that important for you to do for both of those guys?
A: Because of what they’ve done for this program. I got really emotional, and these guys will tell you, before the Ohio State game, I don’t know what got into me. I hadn’t been that way forever. I don’t know if it was exhaustion, stress, anxiety. But I got pretty emotional. And I held it together tonight for the most part, but that moment with the timeouts, seeing Stetson and those defensive players – you don’t see what they sacrifice. You don’t see (Javon) Bullard, when his shoulder comes out and he won’t put on a black jersey, and you’re like, you can’t go, Bullard. And he won’t come out of practice. And he’s still hitting people. His shoulder comes out tonight, his collarbone, and he just stays in the game. He embodies what our culture is, which is toughness. And I have a very serious appreciation for that because they do it for a university I love. And it means a ton to me when they sacrifice like that for our university.
Q: What’s the significance of this team going 15-0 mean to you, and why was this team able to do that?
A: The significance is there’s no blemish. I had four national championships at Alabama, I don’t think we had but one that was undefeated, and that one was really special. Sometimes it takes a loss to galvanize, put your team in a spot to win. It did that last year. And it didn’t take that. I always tell guys, do you have to take a loss to learn? Why? Like, it doesn’t take that to learn that. And this team is special because they didn’t have a flaw. They had two games in which they came back in the fourth quarter, Missouri and Ohio State, with incredible comebacks and led by Stetson and the offense. So it makes it more special, I think, when you come back and look at it, because when you want to compare teams you’ll say, hey, look at this team. There’s some parts of me that think, if the team last year played this year’s team, last year’s team probably had more talent on it. But this year’s team was different. Like, they just had this eye of the tiger; they weren’t going to lose.
