If one wants to make a case that Kirby Smart has lost his fastball and the program's best days are behind it, well, that case won't be made by yours truly but it is indeed there to be made. A 2024 Georgia team that returned a whopping 15 starters fell well short of expectations (even though they did win the SEC title), dropping regular season games to Alabama and Ole Miss and exited the College Football Playoff in the quarterfinals. Georgia's No. 6 AP finish was the program's lowest since 2020. Now, the 2025 team returns only seven starters. There's no way Georgia can possibly improve! Kirby is finished!
While Georgia will likely begin the year outside the AP top-5 for the first time since 2017, the optimistic case for the 2025 Bulldogs is built around two beliefs: 1) That the infrastructure at Georgia is at such an elite level that UGA can still win the SEC even in a down year, and 2) Georgia will be one of the biggest examples of addition by subtraction in recent college football history.
Smart wowed the assembled press at SEC Media Days in Atlanta by stating 54 percent of Georgia's roster is first- or second-year players, a stark contrast from last year when the Dawgs (and others) were full of fifth- and sixth-year covid players. While that experience is gone, something else has replaced it: "fire, passion and energy." He mentioned that specific phrase seven times in his 20-ish minutes at the podium.
We've had practices that have been spirited. We had a great spring practice that we talked about the words fire, passion and energy," he said. "I think the biggest thing that separates college football teams today is complacency among players versus fire, passion and energy among players. So we've tried to highlight those traits as much as possible with our players."
While acknowledging there is no substitute for development -- "If you want to speed up development, then you're probably looking for shortcuts that don't exist" -- Smart hopes Georgia will gain something from a roster full of players who, for lack of a fancier turn, are excited to be there. "That can be positive and negative," Smart said of last year's wealth of experience compared to this year's. "I can sit up here last year and tell you how experienced we are, but are they motivated? Are they really wanting to be great? Sometimes when it's new, there's a lot more excitement. It's their first time to start, their first time being a major part of the rotation."
And so while the 2025 Georgia team will be different than the 2024 outfit, Smart spoke about how he's adapting to recent changes to make current and future rosters resemble the 2021-22 teams as much as possible, groups that were special because they recruited the high-end of the talent pool as well as anyone while also uncovering hidden gems better than anyone in college football. I thought these were as insightful answers as I've heard any coach provide on these topics, and will present them in full below.
On finding and valuing walk-ons in the onset of the 105-man roster limit era: "We want kids who love the game. We've found it's not how fast you run the 40, it's how fast you run the 40th 40, and how passionate you are in the third and fourth quarter. Sometimes those guys have more intrinsic value for your team than maybe a guy who is a scholarship player but is disinterested because he's not playing. I think you can reward those by going out and finding kids to fit in your 105 -- it doesn't matter whether you call those kids a walk-on or just a scholarship player who may not get as much NIL -- that play with fire, passion and energy. I'm looking forward to continuing that long history we have of doing that by finding the right kind of players to come play at Georgia."
On recruiting and coaching players in the NIL and rev-share era: "It's less about what the tape looks like. If we're going to sign four DBs, there's going to be a thousand DBs that are good enough on the tape. Let's don't talk about the ones that are above the line, are they good enough to play winning football at Georgia? There's thousands. Let's just get the ones that care. The ones that are not transactional, they want relationships, they want to be coached, they want to be pushed. And yeah, they're going to get paid. No coach is going to stand up here and say they don't want players to get paid; we want them to get paid, I am completely comfortable with that. What I want is for them to not get paid and that not change how they go about their business, that not change if they're sensitive to being demanded excellence of. It's so ironic to me that you meet a parent and they're like, 'Coach, I really want my son to play where he's pushed and demanded of and he gets coached each and every day the hard way because I honestly don't think he can make it without that.' We all needed it. A 17-year-old needs to be pushed. It doesn't preclude them of gaining monetary value. They can do both those two things, but a lot of coaches aren't willing to do that. People don't want to confront and demand any more for fear of losing a player. I would rather go get the right player that buys into all that, and then I've got something special when they do get all those reps."
Entering a season without championship-or-bust expectations for the first time in a long time, Smart hopes to mesh new approaches to old techniques to bring in familiar results.