Many coaches believe in using a big loss as a motivating factor throughout the off season. There's no shortage of stories of coaching cutting out newspapers articles and putting them in the weight room or in lockers, or using other reminders like having the game played on a loop on televisions around the facility as a constant reminder of the bad taste the loss leaves you with.
Kirby Smart noted at his press conference over the weekend that while players may say that they're using the loss to Alabama in the national title game as motivation when asked by reporters, he personally doesn't believe in that approach and refuses to dig it back up for that purpose.
"We don't discuss that because that team is no longer here."
"I don't believe in motivation through fear, or motivating just through revenge. Can revenge be a factor? Yeah. But we don't have Alabama on the regular season schedule here, we have more to worry about than that."
"I'd rather they have more of an intrinsic motivation of 'I want to be the best player that I can be. I want to get the best that I can be.' I don't want it to be 'because of this' because you may not always have that."
Smart went on to note that while they don't talk about it a ton, they did take a few specific things from the game.
"We really don't talk about it. We do talk about the lessons that we learned in coverage, the lessons we learned on keeping the quarterback in the pocket, protecting the ball, we learned lessons from the game, but we're not using the game as our mantra, or our battle cry. I just don't think that's what you want to do."
Hear more from Smart in the clip.
https://youtu.be/xKWam0TNjEg?t=625