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Kirby Smart hit with Twitter community note following call out of Sugar Bowl officials

by:Alex Byington01/03/25

_AlexByington

Kirby Smart
© Stephen Lew-Imagn Images

First it was Kirk Herbstreit. Now the social media editor brigade has come for Kirby Smart.

A video of the Georgia Bulldogs‘ head football coach’s postgame comments complaining about Notre Dame‘s infamous 11-man substitution that prompted an offside calls against the Bulldogs late in Thursday night’s 23-10 Sugar Bowl loss received a strong rebuke in the form of not one but two community notes on X/formerly known as Twitter.

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The X/Twitter community notes cited the NCAA rulebook showing a team can’t substitute more than 11 players “while the ball is in play” to counter Smart’s complaint, and then doubled-down with a YouTube video of the play revealing the Notre Dame long snapper never got set or even touched the ball before the Irish initiated the 11-man substitution, which made it a dead ball and thus a legal substitution.

Kirby Smart calls out officials, Notre Dame substitution that led to Georgia penalty

The play of the night may have been a fourth quarter substitution by the Fighting Irish that prompted an offsides call against Georgia linebacker Jalon Walker on fourth-and-1 that allowed Notre Dame to effectively run out much of the final 7-plus minutes of the game. 

Backed up on its own 18-yard-line, Irish head coach Marcus Freeman originally had his punt team on the field before a mass substitution that brought his offense back in. Kirby Smart rushed his defense back out there and a few moments later, but quarterback Riley Leonard managed to force Walker to jump for a free first down.

Following the game, Smart called out the officials for even allowing Notre Dame to substitute all 11 players. He argued SEC officials informed him that was not permitted after attempting to pull a similar stunt early in his career in Athens. Notably, a Big 12 Conference crew was working Thursday’s Sugar Bowl, creating the potential for a different interpretation of the NCAA rule.

“They wanted us to burn a timeout there and try to do it,” Smart said postgame. “And we subbed. So it’s really unfortunate, because I’ve been told by our head of officials in the SEC that you can’t do that. You can’t run 11 on, 11 off. We did it in 2017 against Tennessee. We’ve carried that. We practiced that and repped that because teams try to do it, and we were told by officials you could not do that.”

Following the first down, Notre Dame ran 13 more plays that took off nearly 5 1/2 minutes off the gameclock before punting the ball back to Georgia with 1:49 remaining in regulation.

“We got our defense out there,” Smart said. “We were fine. I mean, I would have gone for it, if I was them. I don’t think they were planning on going for it. They were going to hard-count us. We prepare for that. We do it every week. We jumped offsides, you know? But we also were told you couldn’t do that in our league.”

Griffin McVeigh contributed to this report.