Kirby Smart details his approach to learning from other coaches

Few coaches in college football have been as successful as Georgia coach Kirby Smart, certainly within the last few years.

The Georgia head man is at the top of the game, the coach of the back-to-back national champions with a squad that could very well repeat a third time. Smart was asked about his coaching influences this week and whether he actively studies other great coaches like Bill Belichick.

“No, I just work,” Smart said. “I respect coaches and I love to learn from them, but I don’t study them. Go out and say what’s his win-loss record, I mean you learn from the people you work for. I spent a long time working for some really good coaches in Bobby Bowden, Mark Richt, my dad, coach (Nick) Saban. So you emulate those that you work for and you admire most.”

However Smart does it, other coaches would be wise to study him. He’s clearly got a working blueprint, in much the same way that Saban built a working blueprint at Alabama.

Still, plenty of other college coaches have worked under Saban and gotten their shot at the head gig only to come up way short.

Smart has actually made it work. And in the meantime, he’s created his very own coaching tree of sorts. One that will see a meeting of minds in this week’s game against South Carolina.

Shane Beamer learned from Kirby Smart

South Carolina coach Shane Beamer paid tribute to Smart this week, in anticipation of their matchup on the gridiron. Beamer worked for Smart at Georgia in 2016 and 2017, an experience he said was formative.

For one, he got to see how adaptive Smart could be to any circumstance.

“I saw that from Kirby,” Beamer said. “Obviously Kirby when he got hired at Georgia had been pretty much with Nick Saban and that Alabama model for his entire career, so he had a blueprint of a foundation of what he wanted it to look like initially when he came in, because that’s what he had been exposed to and here’s how we’re doing things. But from Day 1 the willingness and the ability to adapt and if there’s a better way of doing things, show him.”

One of the other things Beamer said he learned from watching Smart was the sense of urgency you need as a coach.

“Certainly just the urgency that you’ve got to have every single day in coaching and recruiting,” Beamer said. “When you step in that building there wasn’t going to be a wasted moment. You were working, there was an urgency. The way they do things in practice were very similar in a lot of ways to how we practice here. There was a lot of things, to be honest with you.”