Kirby Paul Smart was 39 when he became head coach of his alma mater. He’ll turn 46 two days before Christmas. Only two of the 14 SEC coaches – Nick Saban and Mark Stoops – have served their current employer longer. Soon there will be 16 SEC coaches, Texas and Oklahoma having recently pledged their fickle fidelity to the place where it just means … well, you know.
On Friday, ahead of his Bulldogs’ first practice, Smart addressed the media via Zoom. In the first 10 minutes of his Q-and-A, he discussed COVID-19, NILs and Texas/OU. These weren’t hot-button issues in December 2015, but it’s 2021 and our world is spinning so fast that only centripetal force keeps us from flying off into space.
Coaching in the SEC, assuming you do it successfully, will make you rich. Smart’s earns roughly $7 million per season. It can also make you paranoid and truculent and darn near crazy – if you let it. This isn’t to say that the head Dog doesn’t have moments of paranoia and truculence. All football coaches do. This is to note that he has made his peace with a job that bears only slight resemblance to the one he accepted five years and seven months ago.
Physically, Smart looks the same as he did in December 2015, an achievement in itself. At least where we media folks are concerned, he has developed a patience, perhaps grudgingly, that was absent when he was a rookie head coach. Back then, he was a youngish man in a hurry. On Friday, he stood still for one of those windy did-you-ever-dream questions from this correspondent that might once have prompted an “I’m here to talk about football” response.
His job, Smart conceded is “not what it used to be. I don’t even think it’s the same as what it was when I signed up to be a head coach, and that’s relatively recent. I think it’s unfortunate, but I also think, as our commissioner (the SEC’s Greg Sankey) said, times are changing. When things change, you either adapt with them or you get passed by. You’re not going to get a complaint out of me.”
Then: “I certainly enjoy the joy of coaching much more than I do managing. We find ourselves much more often now as managers than as coaches. That’s not what I got into the profession to do. I got into the profession to coach and affect people. When I start steering away from that, just like coming over to this Zoom today, I want to be getting ready for the practice and what I’m going to do in my meeting and how I’m going to prepare them. You’ve got to deal with what you’re dealt. You’ve got to have good time-management skills so that you spend it with your players.”
Georgia is coming off a season that would have frazzled a saint. Owing to COVID, the Bulldogs – like every FBS team – were forced to be medical clinic first, a football team second. Their Kentucky game was postponed a week. Their Missouri game was delayed a month. Their Missouri game was in doubt until kickoff. Their Vanderbilt game wasn’t played. The man they expected to be their No. 1 quarterback opted out of the season. Their starting quarterback in Game 1 never started again.
Before the Chick-fil-Peach Bowl against Cincinnati, Smart made this concession: “I’d like to say I don’t know what the threshold is for what you deal with in a season and stay sane. We’ve stretched that rubber band about as far as you can.”
Not eight months later, Smart was still being asked about the virus, which isn’t quite the same virus that confronted us in December. Ninety percent of his players have been vaccinated, he said. “We feel really comfortable where we are. My goal is always to be 100 percent because I think it’s the safest thing for our players.”
Then: “I would not say it’s back to normal. There are spikes going on across the country. In our state and our hospital systems across the Southeastern Conference, it’s scary.”
Then: “You’re only as a good as your last COVID test.”
Department-of-duh: We live in stressful times. And yet, coaching UGA in the mighty SEC, Smart hasn’t allowed the job to run him. There’s a relative ease – “relative” because he’s by nature a Type A guy – about him. He has remade the program. He has won everything short of the national championship, and he’ll get one of those soon. For all that went wrong last season, the Bulldogs lost only twice and led Alabama at the half, which nobody else did.
In December 2015, he was the right hire for Georgia. In 2021, where everything is less certain and exponentially more fraught, he’s the right coach.
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