Kirby Smart describes how Carson Beck handles adjustments, draws comparison to Stetson Bennett
Carson Beck made his first start for Georgia last weekend and helped lead the Bulldogs to a 48-7 win over Tennessee-Martin.
Beck has been lauded for excelling in the cerebral part of the game, and as Georgia heads into Week 2, head coach Kirby Smart was asked about Beck and his freedom at the line of scrimmage to guide the offense in the right direction.
“Yeah there’s parameters you give them, there’s runs that have checks,” Smart said. “They have runs that have checks from run to run, they’re runs that have checks from run to pass, there’s certain looks you’re allowed to check to pass. Every week we package those, but not every play has those.”
“So there’s sometimes when you’re going to sit back, and as you guys can do and we can do as coaches, you can second guess and say well he should have thrown that ball because it had an option to throw. Then there’s a check to a throw which is completely different than a run pass option.”
Georgia’s offense may sound complicated, but thankfully it isn’t for Carson Beck, who completed 67.7% of his passes in Week 1 for 294 yards in the air along with a passing and rushing score on the day.
On a play-to-play basis Beck is tasked pre-snap to set the Bulldogs up for the most success possible, but thankfully it’s something he’s become accustomed to as he’s in the midst of his fourth season with the program.
“So it’s really complicated and elaborate but he did what he was coached to do and he did exactly the things that we wanted them to do. They got two outside we’re checking this, okay they got this we’re doing this,” Smart explained. “He followed those and he’s already done that, he did that all last year under Coach (Todd) Monken. So he did it in practice because he had to be ready to play. If they’ve got this coming we can’t run that play and we gotta we gotta go over here and do this play.”
Not every play in Georgia’s offense is an equation, but for those plays, Beck has all the answers reminiscent of another quarterback in recent Georgia history, Stetson Bennett. And if he can attain similar success as Bennett, there will be plenty of happy Bulldog fans in Athens this season.
“So not every play has that because some plays are fastball, some plays are speed break, every play has its own identity. But he’s very bright and he understands it and we’re lucky that we can do some of the things we can do because he’s like Stetson in that way that he’s been in the system long enough to handle the volume,” Smart said.