Kirby Smart focused on Georgia dominance, 'squeezing out the uncompetitive'

ATHENS, Ga. — Kirby Smart‘s eight years at Georgia have been defined by one thing: consistency. The Bulldogs have been one of the nation’s top teams, finishing in the top seven each of the last seven years. However, there’s more that he wants. Smart wants to see the Dawgs dominate College Football.

“I was brought here to win championships, but the thing I’m proudest of has been the consistency. I look back on Year 1 (when Georgia went 8-5) as a failure and not the standard, but every year after that we’ve been right there,” Smart told ESPN’s Chris Low in a sit-down Q&A this past week. “Nobody else over that span can say they’ve finished in the top seven at the very end for seven straight years. You can’t find it, not even at Alabama. We missed the damn playoff three times by being No. 5 or No. 6, so those are missed at-bats we would have had in this 12-team playoff.”

“We’ve been relevant every year but that first one. I want more than relevance. I want dominance, and we’ve been more dominant in the last three years,” he continued. “What I don’t want are the ebbs and flows or the one-hit wonders you see out there. I don’t want any player to leave Georgia without a championship.”

Having brought Georgia’s first National Championship back to Athens in 41 years in 2021 only to follow it up with another the next season, UGA is on its way to dominating the sport. In fact, the Bulldogs were on their way to a third championship in as many years this past season – something that hasn’t been accomplished since the 1930s prior to the AP Poll era – but a hiccup in the SEC Championship Game against Alabama cost Georgia a spot in the College Football Playoffs and ended an SEC-record win streak at 29 games.

Smart still believes his Bulldogs were one of the best four teams in 2023 and should have been in the Playoffs. They showed that in the Orange Bowl with a 63-3 annihilation of Florida State. Understandably though, with a blemish on their resume and without a conference championship to show for, Georgia was left on the outside looking in in the final year of a four-team championship event.

Now, Georgia hits reset in a new era of College Football. Conferences are changing seemingly by the day, and more teams will be in the title picture with Playoff expansion. Everything’s going to look a little bit different. Even Smart’s biggest hurdle to overcome in having the Bulldogs dominate the sport – Nick Saban – is gone. That being said, all eyes in Athens are on the future and having UGA be the example of excellence.

“If you have a rubber band and you keep stretching and you stretch it and you stretch it, eventually it loses its constriction and it’s just loose,” Smart said about the secret to avoiding complacency, comparing it to elasticity. “I tell our guys all the time, ‘We’re going to stretch you every day, every day to where you’re really comfortable being uncomfortable. We’re going to make you uncomfortable at practice.’ Guys will come up to me and tell me they can’t make it through practice. Our practices are more intense than games, and that’s purposeful because I feel like it gives your team the ability to sustain the season. To get up for every game, you have to get up for every practice. If you don’t, that’s when you get your ass beat.”

“We do a really thorough job of evaluating. We still think our evaluation matters and not the star system,” he added. “It’s easy to get lazy and not evaluate the right things. We’ve passed on some kids that we didn’t think were the right fit, and then we’ve gotten kids that weren’t good fits and they left. So there’s a lot of pressure in this organization to squeeze out the uncompetitive.”

Georgia has two weeks of spring practice to go, wrapping up action on Saturday, April 13th with the annual G-Day spring game (1:00 p.m. ET, SECN+). The Bulldogs, likely to enter 2024 as the preseason top-ranked team, are set to open the season in Atlanta with a neutral site, top-25 matchup against Clemson on August 31st.