Todd Monken's trust in Kirby Smart paying massive dividends for Georgia

ATLANTA, Ga. — Todd Monken jokes that when he met with Kirby Smart in the winter of 2020, he wasn’t sure whether he was getting the full picture or if the Georgia head coach was giving him a sales pitch. Jokes are often funny because they’re true.

Smart told Monken that he wanted to change the perception of Georgia’s offense. He wanted to be aggressive and explosive and he wanted it to appeal to the best pass catchers, ball carriers and quarterbacks. Smart also said that he wanted to give Monken the entire show.

We all know what happened next. Monken accepted, the Bulldogs slogged through the COVID-19 affected 2020 season, and it has been pretty incredible since. Georgia has won 27 of its 28 games over the past two seasons. It has an SEC Championship, a Heisman Trophy finalist for a quarterback, and needs two wins for a second straight National Title.

It started with Monken choosing to trust his current boss.

“The things that he said he needed and that he wanted, he’s done all of that and hopefully I’ve held up my end of the bargain,” Monken said in a 26-minute breakout session with reporters on Wednesday.

“It’s been great. It’s been everything he said it would be when he hired me. He said, ‘I’ll let you do what you want to do. Yeah, I’m the head coach and there’s certain things I believe in but I want someone who can come in and run it and I don’t have to worry about it.”

That last part was what Monken thought could be a sales pitch. Smart is a defensive coach and sometimes those guys like the offense to operate in a way that maximizes the defense’s success. Smart even had that reputation despite repeated comments about wanting to be more explosive and wanting to get the kind of players who could help the Bulldogs operate that way.

So, in Monken’s words, Smart wanted to change the perception of UGA’s offense. Coming of a 2019 season that was an absolute grind due to what can best be described as a regression as James Coley served as coordinator, a jolt was needed.

Gettin playmakers was always the long-term fix but the short-term remedy was to bring in a veteran offensive coach with a history of building explosive attacks with the players he had. All Monken has done is turn former walk-on quarterback Stetson Bennett into a 3,000-yard passer and Heisman Trophy finalist and guide the UGA offense to an average of just under 40 points per game despite not scoring much in the fourth quarter due to blowouts.

The Bulldogs rank No. 13 nationally in yards per pass attempt and No. 7 nationally in yards per carry and yards per play. Bennett aplays a big role and Monken still shakes his head when he thinks about his quarterback’s plight from essentially unwanted third or fourth-string signal caller to face of the program.

Georgia has also gotten the most out of talented playmakers like Brock Bowers, Darnell Washington, Kenny McIntosh, and Ladd McConkey in 2022. Now Monken is getting ready to call his third College Football Playoff game in the past two years. He’s the highest-paid assistant coach in the sport.

He’s right where most coaches in his role want to be but there’s not much time to dwell on that part of it. As much as he has enjoyed coaching at Georgia and helping the program win games, Monken also knows that he is paid to keep doing it.

“My job is to work my ass off and for us to be as good as we can on offense,” Monken said. “The moment I don’t see it that way (is) the moment I’m wrong. This is a business. This isn’t… I’ve done organizations where ‘this is a family.’ This isn’t a family. You’re going to fire me if we suck, so don’t say it’s a family. This is the way it is. This is what we choose to do. This is a business and I get it that way and my job is to do the best job I can for Kirby Smart and our players. That’s hard. It’s a hard job. It’s hard to win a lot and that’s part of it.”