Kirby Smart assesses action from Georgia's second spring scrimmage
ATHENS, Ga. — Anybody who’s been watching The Masters knows, it’s been a rain soaked weekend in the Peach State. That’s why Kirby Smart and Georgia Football decided to move up their second scrimmage of the spring, originally set to take place on Saturday before going through with it on Thursday instead.
Smart was happy with the decision that was made. While he would have liked to have another day to clean up scrimmage one before going through the second scrimmage, he’s just glad they got the work in as opposed to missing out on the opportunity to see the team live.
“It really just flip-flopped. What we would’ve done Thursday we did today and what we would’ve done today, Saturday, we did Thursday. We just switched them,” Smart said. “The worst part about that is we probably didn’t have enough time to clean up everything up from the last scrimmage that I would’ve liked. We have an installation process where some things would’ve gone in on Thursday that we didn’t get to put in that we had to go scrimmage without, but we got the scrimmage in, and that was the most important thing.”
“I told our staff, everybody in the Southeastern Conference and southeastern area (of the country) was probably battling the weather. Who managed it best?,” he continued. “We tried to manage it best by beating the weather. I know we got a lot out of today and that was my goal.”
Per usual, there were things Smart said he would have liked to have been better in the scrimmage. That applied to both sides of the ball. Last time out, tackling was a problem for the defense. This week the thing Smart took most issue with was on offense, specifically false starts and alignment issues.
“We had more mistakes than I would have liked on both sides of the ball, but offensively administratively we had a lot of false start penalties, alignment issues — two people moving,” Smart said. “One of the youngest spots on our team outside of outside linebacker is probably wideout when you include three mid-year receivers, two portals, that’s five. So five people basically trying to learn a new language, and it is a new language because they didn’t speak that language prior to coming here. So that’s a little bit of the frustration there.”
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Smart added that the run game wasn’t quite as strong either in the second scrimmage. Admittedly though, he said they didn’t run the ball as much as they did in the first trying to evaluate the quarterbacks more. As for how they did, it was what you might expect with guys that haven’t played a ton of football – up and down.
“Less bone-headedness today than previous. I don’t think the second scrimmage was… there were moments where concede the down, live for another down. If that happens to be third down, that’s okay. You can punt, you can kick a field goal. You can go for it on fourth, but not if you had bone-headedness. They seem to grasp that better. But they all need to play,” Smart said. “They all need to play football. Go out and play football. Not have a drill, not routes on air, not 7-on-7. They need to play. That’s what we’re trying to do in our practices is to make sure we get enough playing. Playing is third down. There is not greater pressure on a quarterback than third down. First and second down, play action and handoff, eh not a lot there. It’s either there or it’s not. Third down, that is where you make the separation. We’re trying to put those guys in that situation so we can improve them.”
“All around, it was not as good a scrimmage as the first scrimmage, which was probably disappointing. When you change schedules, sometimes young kids don’t adjust to that,” Smart added. “… We were able to go inside today and have a really highly organized, detailed, energetic practice that I was really excited about. You don’t typically get your best practices the day after a scrimmage on a Saturday, and I thought we had a really good practice today. I give a lot of credit, number one to our players, number two to our coaches for being very organized and detailed on it, and the enthusiasm of everybody that helped make it happen. So I was pleased with how hard they worked.”
Georgia wrapped up Week Four of spring football on Saturday and will get underway with the fifth and final week of action on Tuesday. Next week the Bulldogs will work on Tuesday and Thursday before taking the field at Sanford Stadium in front of a limited capacity crowd for the annual G-Day spring game, set for 4:00 p.m. ET on ESPN2.
