Kirby Smart still finds value in SEC Championship despite College Football Playoff concerns

The Georgia Bulldogs are back in the SEC Championship Game where they’ll play the Texas Longhorns in a regular season rematch. It’s the first of what head coach Kirby Smart hopes will be a deep run in the postseason this year.

Ahead of the game, as Smart explained, the game hasn’t lost any luster for him despite the fact both teams are presumably locks to make the College Football Playoff. It’s still an honor.

“It depends on who you ask,” Kirby Smart said. “When you ask a guy that’s been in the SEC for about 30 years, has only been a part of five or six of ’em, five or six national championships, it’s equal to that to me ’cause it’s just as hard, it’s just as elusive. It has been for us.”

In the new College Football Playoff format, the top-four ranked conference champions earn first round byes. That could be a massive help in winning a national championship. So, there is a real value in winning besides the bragging rights and honor that come with a conference title.

“It’s an extreme honor to, number one, make this game with the schedule that you have to go through. Then with an opportunity to win it, I mean, we put the years of SEC Championship on a wall and it’s there forever. There’s not that many more of those than there are national championships,” Smart said. “It’s hard to attain. So I still find value in it.”

This comes after Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin recently made headlines with his own comments about the SEC Championship. He shared that there are coaches who didn’t want to make the SEC Championship because of the fallout of losing it. In some cases, it could be one loss too many and cost a team a Playoff spot. Other times, it might take away a bye week if you lose and make it more difficult to get healthy as a team.

“I’ve talked to other coaches, so I’ll just kind of give you the feeling from some other coaches that. They don’t want to be in it. You know, the reward to get a bye [ in the CFP] versus the risk to get knocked out completely. I mean, that’s a that’s a pretty big — that’s a really big risk. I think it has ended up being a very unique situation of all postseason sports, the way that system is set up there. How you could go to [the SEC Championship] and get knocked out [of the CFP race]? And if you don’t go [to the SEC Championship game], you’re in,” Kiffin said in November.

“There’s a cost and benefit to everything. There’s great benefits to this playoff system and so many people being excited and fans and programs and more games, and then there’s cost, too. The conference championships don’t mean as much. And it’s not just, do you potentially get knocked out by losing that? Do you [have] more injuries? So you’re going to go get more injuries, play another game to get a bye, but then the other people are having their bye while you’re playing [in the conference championship game.] So I think that’s why, and I’ll go on record saying it, why a lot of coaches — or some coaches I’ve talked to — don’t want to go to [the SEC].”

Since Lane Kiffin made his comments, Ole Miss suffered a third conference loss and was knocked out of the running for the SEC Championship. Georgia, meanwhile, did make the championship, the fourth straight season they’ve done so under Kirby Smart. In 2017 and 2022, the Bulldogs have won the SEC under Smart.

Georgia and Texas are set to play for the SEC Championship Game in Atlanta on Saturday, December 7th, at 4:00 p.m. EST.