Tuesday marked Kirby Smart's 11th appearance at SEC Media Days. With Mark Stoops no longer at Kentucky, Smart is now the Dean of SEC Coaches by either three or four years, depending upon how you count it*. Having stepped up to the podium in the big room 11 times now, Smart can spot troll questions coming from a mile away, including one Tuesday about how losing Tennessee off Georgia's schedule means "one less win" for the Bulldogs.
"Yeah," Smart replied, "you said that, not me."
"It's a tough place to play and a tough team to play," he continued, slipping into full diplomat mode. "I've got a lot of respect for Josh (Heupel) and their staff. They're a tough prep. They're really hard to prepare for, and I'm glad other teams get an opportunity to do that because they get some new teams to play, and then we get some new teams to play. It's very unique scheduling, looking forward to the new format and the matchups that are created through the new format."
The premise of the trolling question isn't entirely wrong, though.
Smart is 9-1 against Tennessee, losing on a Hail Mary in his 2016 debut season and then ripping off nine consecutive wins and counting. Eight of the nine wins came by remarkably similar scores: 41-0, 38-12, 43-14, 44-21, 41-17, 27-13 (when the Vols came to Sanford Stadium as the No. 1 team in the country), 38-10, and 31-17. Last year's game was a classic, and still a Georgia win. The Bulldogs went 75 yards in nine plays, scoring from 28-yards out on 4th-and-6, to tie the game at 38-38 with 2:32 left in regulation, and then surviving a missed 43-yard field goal at the buzzer before winning 44-41 in overtime.
This fall marks the first without a Georgia-Tennessee (or Tennessee-Georgia) game since 1991, the year prior to the East/West divisional split upon the additions of Arkansas and South Carolina.
While losing Tennessee, Georgia goes to Arkansas for just the second time since 2009 (their 2014 game was in Little Rock), gets a Sugar Bowl rematch with Ole Miss, their fifth game with the Rebels in four seasons after not playing at all from 2017-22, and hosts Oklahoma at Sanford Stadium for the first time ever.
For its part, Tennessee hosts Texas for the first time ever, gets Auburn at home for the first time since 2013, hosts LSU for the first time since 2017, and visits Kyle Field for just the second time since the Aggies joined the SEC 14 seasons ago. (And yes, despite changing its scheduling format to end annual games like Georgia-Tennessee, the Bulldogs will still have to wait at least 15 seasons before they make their first trip to College Station.)
Overall, I thought Smart represented himself, Georgia and the SEC very well in his first turn as the unofficial spokesman of the league's coaches. Case in point: the 2-time defending SEC champions have lost their CFP opener two years in a row. Smart argued he'd prefer a Playoff format where a team's reward for a top-4 seed isn't a near month-long layoff while their competition only has a 2-week layoff, while at the same time having the self-awareness and the humility to concede, "You can always the opposite, especially when it doesn't go your way. That's not who I am."
* - This will be Eli Drinkwitz's seventh season at Missouri, the longest continuous run in the conference outside of Smart, but Lane Kiffin's eighth as an SEC head coach, split between three institutions.