Kirby Smart believes roster turnover, not scheduling, is biggest threat to undefeated seasons

Georgia Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart has an unbeaten season on his resume as a head coach. Now, he like many others in college sports, isn’t sure how many more teams and coaches are going to be able to pull off that feat.

For many, the logic comes down to the length of the season. With the expanded College Football Playoff, teams are playing longer schedules, giving them more time to trip up. However, Smart sees it a little differently. As he explained at the SEC spring meetings, it’s actually roster attrition that’s the major issue going unbeaten.

“I would like to say, yes, you would see fewer,” Kirby Smart said. “But I would say it’s not because of the schedule and the length of the schedule. It would be because of the portal and the lack of depth and the more parity.”

NIL and the Transfer Portal have rapidly shifted how rosters are constructed. That’s been going on for a few seasons now. That includes giving players who, in the past, would have provided elite teams with depth, the chance to transfer elsewhere and get more immediate playing time. That’s created more parity on rosters and made injuries harder to overcome. To Smart’s point, it’s also made going undefeated more difficult.

That is the reality as Smart sees it for now. However, there is a chance that changes could once again be coming. In particular, the House Settlement is going to allow for revenue sharing with athletes. That’s the first of what could be a string of changes coming in the future that would, once again, reshape roster building.

“As soon as I say that, it depends on the way things go in the next 6-10 months. You could end up with some haves and have nots out there,” Smart said. “And ultimately a team could drive prices and go buy a championship like you’re talking about with super teams. I mean, I think we could see that if there’s not parity. We don’t really know if there’s going to be or not.”

Kirby Smart told ‘no crying from the yacht’ when discussing transfer portal windows

Recently, Kirby Smart has been advocating for making changes to the Transfer Portal. In particular, he would like to cut down to one window to transfer instead of two. However, as he noted at the SEC spring meetings, he received some interesting pushback recently.

“So the biggest decision that has to be made across football right now, by far to me, is when is the portal window and is there one or two. Okay, that’s not being decided by us today. A lot of people don’t even know how it’s getting decided. Who’s deciding it, but I need you to think for a second, there is a strong contingent. We had an AFCA meeting. We had a meeting in which we unanimously decided that there really needed to be one portal window, whatever that is, what it is, and it needs to happen sometime in January,” Smart said.

“There’s different conferences that feel like it should not fall out during playing season … Is basketball able to do that? Or do they deal with the portal during their championship? During their tournament … We deal with that. Okay, that’s because of the academic calendar for us … Oh, by the way, we had to deal with that multiple times. It’s not fun. It’s not fun. It’s really hard to be playing in a championship setting, and having to deal with that. But when I brought that up as a complaint or a problem, it was told to me, there’s no crying from a yacht. So if you’re going to play in these environments, you have to be willing to do that.”