Kirby Smart opens up on how Georgia analyzes ‘portal-ability,’ transfer portal risk

The transfer portal is just a fact of life for modern college football. And Georgia head coach Kirby Smart isn’t going to change how he leads his team just because he knows some guys can leave.

Smart, who has lead Georgia to back-to-back national titles, certainly isn’t in the business of trying to run players off, but he understands it’s just going to happen. The best antidote isn’t changing how he goes about things, but taking extra care to make sure he and his staff are landing the right guys out of high school.

“It’s much harder now in this environment because first of all, everybody thinks you have these lined up five-stars, this and that. And you actually don’t. What you do is you get blue-collar guys that want to be there because you really want to — the kids we invest in their freshman and sophomore year, I want them to be there their junior and senior year. We look at a kid when we sign him and go, ‘What’s his portal risk? Is he a high portal risk?’” Smart said on the Pat McAfee Show.

He defined the notion as “portal-ability risk.”

“It’s portal-ability risk. It would be the coach recruiting him to say, ‘Is everything going to be based on playing time?’ Because if it’s truly based just on playing time, you might not be happy right away. So how are you going to deal with that? That guy’s got a higher portal-ability risk than a guy that’s saying, ‘Hey Coach, look, I’m committed to the process. I know if might take me a year, it might take me two years to get on the field but I’m committed to doing that. I don’t have to have instant success. I want the kid that’s willing to say that over the one that just asks me, ‘Am I going to play next year?'” Smart said.

He continued, lauding star wideout Ladd McConkey as an example of a player who was low portal risk and the sort of player Smart loves to have.

“I would rather invest all my practice reps in a guy that’s going to be there and stick it out. Nobody can get that exactly right. Nobody’s going to be 100%. But I would rather invest in people — Ladd McConkey’s a great example. He didn’t play a snap his freshman year but he was on scout team and he was killing people and I said, ‘This dude’s going to be a player.’ … We’re trying to get retention and be a little bit different, but we’re not perfect,” Smart said.

And when players do, ultimately make a decision to transfer and try and play elsewhere, Smart knows better than to take it personally.

Plus, when you’re the top dogs in college football, there are plenty of talents players trying to get in the door, too.

“We have kids leave and you know what? I’m not going to coach them any different. So the way I coach, I know some kids are going to choose to leave. That’s fine. If you choose to leave, there’s 1,000 people wanting to come too. We’re going to try to find the right fits for our program.”