Kirby Smart uses Eugene Asante as example for Georgia scout team

As No. 1 Georgia prepares for a cross-division showdown with Auburn, one Tigers player is playing well enough that coach Kirby Smart has shown his game tape to the team in order to show them how they’re supposed to do things: Eugene Asante.

That’s Auburn’s leading tackle, a linebacker.

“We showed our guys him and then we showed the scout linebackers how hard this guy plays,” Smart said. “Coach (Stacy) Searels was with him there at North Carolina, and he’s played really well this year. He’s a force.”

Eugene Asante transferred into Auburn before the 2022 season and has since gotten his feet under him.

After playing sparingly a year ago, he’s been on a mission in 2023. He leads the Tigers in tackling by a wide margin, already at 28 stops through the first four games of the season.

“He’s an athletic dude, man,” Smart said. “He’s the kind of linebacker that everybody’s playing now, and a lot of the teams in the NFL are playing with. He’s quick, he’s fast, he’s twitch, he can blitz, he can play in space. He closes so fast. He covers down. A lot of his plays have been cover down, strip-outs, effort plays I call them.”

In addition to his 28 tackles, Asante has recorded 3.5 tackles for a loss and 2.0 sacks, recovered a fumble and logged two quarterback hurries and a pass breakup.

You can be sure that Georgia will have him circled in the gameplan.

Auburn-Georgia lacking in hatred?

While Georgia will be keying on Eugene Asante in Saturday’s matchup, what it won’t be doing is relying on any sort of sense of hatred for Auburn.

Auburn coach Hugh Freeze made some headlines Monday when he claimed that the Auburn-Georgia rivalry doesn’t have the same kind of hatred as some other rivalries, like Alabama-Auburn, and for the most part Smart agreed.

“They’re both rivalries,” Smart said. “Georgia-Auburn is a border war rivalry and Alabama-Auburn is obviously an in-state rivalry. That’s on another whole level of difference from being over there because they live with it 365 days. We share that with several other out-of-state rivalries.

“There’s no diminishing of a rivalry. I tend to agree with coach Freeze. It’s not about hate for me. I don’t look at it as I hate any of their players. I recruited a lot of them. I don’t look at it as I hate any of their coaches because I like a lot of their coaches. I’ve known all those guys for a long time and have a lot of respect Hugh.”

Still, when the two teams meet on Saturday you can bet they’ll both be trying to bash each others’ brains in.