Kirby Smart details how bye week helped Gunner Stockton in Georgia's offense

The Georgia Bulldogs appear to be turning to backup quarterback Gunner Stockton for the College Football Playoff after Carson Beck was knocked out of the SEC Championship Game with an injury. With that move, head coach Kirby Smart knows it’s vital to have his backup quarterback prepared to play an elite Notre Dame defense.

Ahead of the game, Smart explained how having the added bye week from being one of the top four seeded teams was able to get Stockton some much needed added practice time.

Get your team’s official College Football Playoff watch from AXIA by CLICKING HERE: “Watches that tell so much more than time”

“I would say just experience,” Kirby Smart said. “Just practice. He got lots of reps prior to these practices, but he’s getting much more now.”

While Georgia did get an extra week to prepare for their first College Football Playoff game of the season. However, they didn’t know, definitively, who they were preparing for until Saturday night. That, in turn, did change the approach at practice.

“I do think knowing that, you know, when you get ready for an opponent like Notre Dame, you need time. We haven’t known who we were going to play for, I guess now what, 24-48 hours we’ve known, 72 hours. There’s certainly a lot of time in prep you can do to prepare for that,” Smart said. “We prepared for some of that prior to that because we knew it would be within two opponents.”

One thing that Gunner Stockton has had at Georgia is time to get comfortable within the system. He came to the Bulldogs as a four-star recruit in the Class of 2022, according to the On3 Industry Ranking. Since then, he’s worked behind Carson Beck and appeared in eight games over the last two seasons.

“But I think the biggest thing is just the competition at practice,” Smart said. “You know, the situations we put him in, all those things allow him to get better as a quarterback.”

Carson Beck went down with a reported UCL injury in the first half of the SEC Championship Game, forcing Gunner Stockton into action. He would end up completing 12 of 16 passes for 71 yards and an interception. That was a second half effort that sparked the Georgia offense enough to win in overtime.

Kirby Smart explains how Georgia’s offense changes with Gunner Stockton at QB

Offenses tend to change when the quarterback changes, something that Kirby Smart is very aware of as he prepared for the College Football Playoff. Smart also knows that it’s going to lead to a change of pace at Georgia.

“Well I think his strengths are somewhat different than Carson’s, obviously. But we’ve known that. There’s not a game we don’t go into that we don’t have a plan for Gunner if he were to have to play. I mean when he’s your backup quarterback he’s got to be ready to play. He functions and operates really well within our current offense,” Smart said. “We don’t think we have to change much in terms of that. He does give us the capability of doing some different things with his athleticism. I thought Mike [Bobo] and those guys did a good job using that. The team has a lot of confidence in Gunner. He’s very smart, very intelligent,” Smart said.

“I don’t know that it’s a lot of change. It’s probably more picking the volume correctly in terms of not having everything that we have with Carson but having things that fit Gunner.”