Kirby Smart 'can't quantify' impact of national championship on recruiting

Kirby Smart and the Georgia Bulldogs boast the No. 2 ranked recruiting class in the nation for 2023 according to On3 Consensus, their eighth consecutive year ranking in the top three nationally. In this new era of college football, NIL has taken center stage in recruiting, but a winning program still holds weight in the recruiting space. Smart, who is still flying high off of a National Championship win to cap last season and looking to repeat again this year, was asked what impact that winning the title has had on recruiting.

“I don’t know if you can measure that, I think it gets you in the conversation with more national guys. But there’s nobody I look at this list and say we wouldn’t have gotten had we not won it or we got them because we won it, I can’t quantify that,” Smart said.

Smart definitely didn’t struggle in recruiting nationally, signing players like Roderick Robinson II from California, to Joenel Aguero from Massachusetts, to Raylen Wilson out of Florida.

The Bulldogs’ recent winning ways may be hard to quantify regarding their impact on recruiting, especially considering how long the Bulldogs have been dominant in the recruiting space, but their results are hard to deny. Georgia didn’t sign a single five-star recruit in this year’s signing class, but lead the nation in four-star signees with 21, headlined by edge Samuel M’Pemba, who’s ranked the No. 34 player in the nation according to On3 Consensus.

There’s still some time to sign additional players from both the high school ranks and the transfer portal, but the Bulldogs are off to a hot start in recruiting this offseason, and being fresh off of a National Championship and on the verge of winning another surely doesn’t hurt the cause.

Kirby Smart breaks down role of NIL in transfer portal recruiting

Georgia is in the middle of juggling several important things right now, from preparing for a College Football Playoff game, to closing strong in recruiting before the early signing period on Dec. 21, to managing name, image and likeness (NIL) and the NCAA transfer portal.

Many of those moving parts are quite interconnected, so how does coach Kirby Smart manage it all?

“Complicated question. I really don’t know, honestly, how to answer it,” Smart said, asked if it was possible to use NIL as a way to get key players to return for an additional season. “There’s not like pressing need. We have a process that we follow, so our process is step by step. There’s a day in the month of each calendar month that I go through and say, ‘OK, it’s time to do this. It’s time to have this conversation. It’s time to educate our players on this in this process,’ and I think communication is the key on that.”

Most coaches have some form of ‘exit interviews’ with players at some point between the end of the season (regular or postseason) and the key windows on the calendar such as the 45-day transfer portal window that began on Dec. 5.

Can NIL be a key part of keeping some players in school longer?

“We have conversations with every player that has eligibility remaining,” Smart explained. “You’re juggling a spreadsheet that I keep, we keep, that has what each guy is doing and where their eligibility is and over here where each guy potentially could come in. And you’re trying to match inflow and outflow. That’s essentially what you’re trying to do.”