Skip to main content
Georgia

Georgia Football understands 'Nobody Cares' outside of Athens, approaching season that way

Palmber-Thombsby: Palmer Thombs09/12/22palmerthombs
On3 image
Tony Walsh/UGA Sports Communications

Georgia Football took on the motto of “lock in and lock out” during fall camp. That was their time to focus solely on football. Now a new phrase has emerged, and it’s one that gets straight to the point: “Nobody Cares.”

Offensive lineman Sedrick Van Pran brought it up on Monday when asked about all of Kirby Smart’s sayings, admitting that he might not be supposed to share that. Maybe he was allowed to. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to. Either way, it was the first time the mantra had been talked about in public. But according to Van Pran and other players, it’s been a big thing behind closed doors since last season.

“I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to really share this, but just our biggest thing lately has been, ‘Nobody cares about your feelings.’ At the end of the day, whether you’re hurt, you are tired from class, nobody really cares. You’re expected to do your job and that’s just what it is,” Van Pran said.

“The biggest one (mantra) we have is ‘Nobody Cares.’ South Carolina, they don’t care if we won the National Championship last year. They’re just worried about this game Saturday,” Warren McClendon added onto Van Pran’s comments. “So we’re putting that behind us, even though it was a big thing, and worrying about what’s in front of us.”

So, if we are into September and this hasn’t been public knowledge until now, where did the ‘Nobody Cares’ motto come from? McClendon said that it first started in Georgia workouts.

“Sometimes it’s from a team meeting. With the ‘Nobody Cares,’ it was on one of our workout shirts,” McClendon said. “We showed up and it was on it. Coach Sinclair, he was like, ‘Nobody cares. We’ve got to keep working, keep choppin’ and keep pushing forward.”

That ‘Nobody Cares’ attitude is similar to the one that the players have about the team’s recent No. 1 ranking in the AP Poll. That doesn’t matter to them, nor will it matter to South Carolina on Saturday. Put simply, it’s just the way that the program operates under the direction of Kirby Smart.

“You create an identity about what you believe in,” Smart said. “We’ve had a pretty good identity around here for a long time about being really physical. And the message might be tweaked game to game, year to year. But we hope the results and the process is the same. Because we don’t really change the approach based on who we play, based on scoreboard, based on anything. So the focus is on us. And that doesn’t change.”

Attack the Day. Keep Choppin’. Keep the main thing the main thing. Elite or Not. WIN: What’s Important Now. All those phrases are still in the vocabulary for Kirby Smart. One thing that won’t change for him, no matter what the motto is. The focus is always going to be on themselves, not the noise coming from the outside world. After all, Georgia knows, nobody outside of their own building cares about any of the pomp and circumstance that has surrounded the program since Smart arrived in Athens, so within it, why should they?

You may also like