Atlanta – SEC MEDIA Days this week, Texas is history. (Well, apart from the rumor that Nick Saban returns to training. But this is only a rumor. For the moment.) Texas as a program is probably the pre-season favorite to win the dry, and Arch Manning is the most anticipated student-athlete participant of the week. Burnt Orange does its best to stifle the dry.
Kirby Smart and Georgia would like a word.
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Georgia is now removed from two years from its last national championship, which in the Smart Kirby era is considered a dry Saharan period. The DAWGS missed the playoffs of four teams after the 2023 season, and fell to Notre Dame in the quarter-final of the extended PCF last year after losing the quarter-Arrière leaving Carson Beck against injury.
Georgia therefore has something to prove, but it will have to do it with a class that has no familiarity with the winning national championships.
“Our team will represent 54% of first and second year players,” said Smart. “The class coded (with an additional year of eligibility) has somehow aged, so we had several players who were in their fifth and sixth year last year, in particular on the offensive and defensive lines.”
Naturally, Smart transforms this youth into a positive, noting that the extremely young class brings a “young exuberance” to Athens.
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“I think that the greatest thing that separates university football teams today is the complacency of players against fire, passion and energy among players,” he said. “Our players must bring juice and energy every day. If they don’t, they will face players who do it.”
One of these new arrivals: the quarter-Arrière Gunner Stockton, which was in a hurry in the emergency service at the end of last year, but now has the starting work. “This is the kind of child you want at the front of the line, and he leads before,” said Smart. “He will be part of our program this year in leadership.”
Smart hinted at the largest question mark of the Georgia program – the attacking and defensive lines – and later in his press conference on Tuesday, said why there may not have a quick solution if the team starts slowly in their efforts to develop their young players.
“You will not accelerate development,” he said. “If you want to accelerate development, then you are probably looking for shortcuts that do not exist. You want to develop someone. It takes time. It takes representatives. We cannot reproduce rehearsals faster. We cannot accelerate the transition of a guy.”
With Carson Beck in Miami, the Bulldogs pin their hopes on Gunner Stockton in the quarter. (Todd Kirkland / Getty images)
(Todd Kirkland via Getty Images)
In other words, Georgia will not have much time to bring these young, exuberant players to Smart standards. The Bulldogs will start the season with two games without conference to provide them with a little stamp before diving in its own full calendar, which begins with Tennessee and Alabama and takes place through this date with Texas in mid-November. (Smart didn’t say it, but we will: the Dawgs beat Texas twice last season. Everyone remembers.)
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On the positive side, while the Georgia calendar in 2025 is brutal, it breaks a lot in favor of the DAWGS – the two marquee games, Texas and Alabama, will both start between the hedges of the Sanford stadium. Georgia will have to go on the road to face the Tennessee and Auburn, and the trap matches with neutral site against Florida and Georgia Tech are also looming, but having a crowd at home behind them for the two biggest games of the season will be extremely precious.
Smart remains one of the sharper observers of the condition of university football, but obviously with a pro-coaching bias. He sees a path through the current trips of university football, and for him, it is a question of having the right people in the right places.
“University athletics and university football are not broken,” said Smart. “I would say that it is in times of change and influx, that … you must navigate better than your competitor, whether it is a conference at the conference or in your own conference. We continue to find ways to do so at the University of Georgia. We sell relationships on transactions. We believe that the relationship allowed us to manage Georgia. ”.
It has worked fairly well so far.
