Kirby Smart puts a percentage on just how unprepared one is stepping into a head coaching role

Kirby Smart had the benefit of working and learning under the greatest college football coach of all time for a decade and, by all accounts, has crushed his first head coaching opportunity at Georgia as he sits at 94-16 overall with two national titles through eight seasons.

Even with his experience under Nick Saban under his belt, Smart admits that the age old belief that no amount of experience can truly prepare you for the responsibilities that come with being a head coach is absolutely accurate.

During a recent sit down with Josh Pate, Smart actually put a percentage on the type of stuff you can never really prepare for until you actually have to juggle head coaching decisions.

Kirby starts off by saying 80% before rattling off the wide variety of decisions that only a head coach makes, but that figure climbs as high as 90% by the end of his answer.

"Ugh. 80% of it," Smart opens by sharing.

"I mean, the media, you don't prepare for that until you do it, and you can say you're going to talk to them as an assistant, but it's not the same. The decisions. The phone calls you get when someone gets in trouble. The who are you going to take? This running back or this running back, or this receiver or this receiver? The hiring and re-hiring of coaches. The support staff hiring." 

"All of these things that come up every year, I'm going to say 80-90% of it, you never do it until you're a head coach. You can't practice that. You have to go through it and do it."

What doesn't change?

"The coaching part of it doesn't change. The coaching offense, defense, and special teams. That didn't change, but the rest of it did."

Smart then goes on to share how Saban provided a small peek behind-the-curtain when seeking advice from his staff on how to deal with certain situations, but everyone understood the final decision of what to do was up to him.

That insight is even more interesting when you consider that Smart has a budding coach tree of his own with guys like Dan Lanning crushing it at Oregon and will be interesting to see how the most recent branch of that tree does in new Georgia State head coach Dell McGee.

Hear more from Smart in the clip.