Kirby Smart confident complacency won't be an issue for Georgia in 2022

One word stands out from the rest with Kirby Smart at SEC Media Days: complacency. Coming off of a National Championship, Smart said he’s congratulated countless times per day. It gets old. He’s certainly happy to have brought back a trophy to his alma mater, but he’s moved on to trying to win another one. That happened this spring. Now as Georgia goes after another National Championship, the question becomes, how does he avoid his team from getting complacent and resting on their laurels?

“Yeah, I don’t think any of our guys would rest on their laurels because we don’t really have a lot of guys that have laurels to rest on,” Smart said. “I think that’s the biggest thing is that everybody keeps bringing up, you know, ‘You won a National Championship. Do you worry about complacency?’ Well, the guys who won it, they’re mostly in NFL camps. So, there’s a lot of hungry guys on our team.”

“I would be more concerned about complacency if you had, you know, I don’t know, 15 of 22 starters back, if you had 12 or 13 of 22 starters back. I would be worried about complacency,” he continued. “But I’m more worried about inexperience. If a kid makes a mistake, you’re going to say, ‘Oh, Georgia got complacent.’ I’m going to say, ‘That kid’s never seen that play. He’s never had that pressure on him.’ So we’re trying to make that happen as much as possible. I’m not as worried about guys, you know, resting on their laurels.”

While Georgia hasn’t come into a season as the defending National Champion – a phrase Smart has avoided at all costs – since 1981, this isn’t the first time Smart has dealt with the defending champions. The first time he crossed paths with Nick Saban came in 2004 at LSU, one year after the Tigers had won it all. Those two won another four National Champions together, and Smart was on staff to try and defend three of those.

“I go back to my first year at LSU. People don’t realize they were coming off a national title. I was not part of that, but we had a tremendous team coming back, like uber talented. A lot of draft picks,” Smart said. “That was probably one of the toughest jobs because you had complacency. You had guys that were going to be first round picks, no matter how they played, off of how they played the year they won the national championship. And then you fast-forward through the four that were able to win in Alabama, you have experience.”

“We got three or four coaches who have done this before in terms of having won a championship, understanding what it takes to do it again,” he continued. “It’s really every situation is different because I’ve been on teams that had a lot of talent coming back, and I’ve had a lot of them that I had to replace talent. We’re having to replace a lot of really good football players. Great news is we’ve recruited well. We’ve got good football players. We need experience. Complacency is not the concern. Experience is our concern. Our kids will buy into that, and we’ll get them ready in fall camp.”

As for Smart, he certainly isn’t complacent. He said he’s not wired that way. In fact, Smart told his team that every time they get congratulated, they should say, ‘Thank you’ and start to think about what they need to do to do it again.

“I kind of told our team when we came back, I said, ‘Look guys I believe in these mind tricks where when people tell you something, it triggers something.’ Every time someone tells me congrats on the National Championship and there have been a gazillion of those, I tell myself each week, ‘This week I’m going to call three more recruits, next week, I’m going to think about what we can do on third down better.’ I tell our players, ‘When you hear that comment, you need to think about what have you done today to be better for tomorrow.’ It just triggers my brain to go somewhere else. My brain has been somewhere else a lot because of that because we’ve gotten a lot of that.”

That kind wiring goes back to his hunger. And Smart said that his team is hungry too.

“There’s a hunger among this group. A lot of guys want to prove that they can replace the other guy. They don’t want to be the other guy, they want to be the next guy,” Smart said. “You look across the board, we had some high-profile players on defense and offense when you count the backs and receivers that we have to replace those guys. The hunger comes from the opportunity the talented players behind them have.”

“I’m excited,” he continued. “Complacency is something that happens to people, they don’t look what’s going on. We don’t have that problem. There’s not a day we don’t wake up and think what can we do to make our program better, and our players are doing that right now.”