One dominant decade is hardly enough for Kirby Smart and his Georgia football team

Just as Kirby Smart finished speaking to the media two weeks ago following Georgia’s thrilling 44-41 win against Tennessee in overtime, university president Jere Morehead was the first person to hug Smart.

The exuberance in Morehead’s face might as well have been from 10 years earlier when Smart returned to his alma mater as head football coach. Morehead was about two and a half years into his role as president and had earlier taught Smart in one of his classes as part of the Georgia faculty when Smart was a student.

He felt strongly at the time that Smart was the right man for the job and repeated as much to Smart outside the Neyland Stadium visiting locker room earlier this month.

“Great job!” Morehead exclaimed.

He might as well have been speaking for Bulldogs everywhere, but it’s still hard to fathom.

Has it really been 10 years?

“I’m just one of those people who’s never going to look at what we’ve done. It’s what can we still do,” Smart told On3. “That’s the way I’m wired, the way this program is wired. There’s a lot more out there for us. Fire, passion and energy. We talk about those three things a lot around here, and they never go away.

“There will be a time to reflect, but it’s definitely not now.”

The translation: Smart and the Bulldogs are still hunting, as exhaustively as ever, and no matter how much college football changes, Smart is constantly looking for different ways to adapt to those changes and keep Georgia’s football machine motoring along as he now enters a decade on the job.

Granted, Smart with his dead-ahead laser focus might not be interested in hearing this – especially as he prepares his No. 5 Georgia team to face No. 17 Alabama on Saturday night at Sanford Stadium – but what a decade it’s been.

The uber-competitive kid from Bainbridge, Georgia, brought his alma mater its first national championship in 41 years in 2021 and then turned around the next year and won another. His Bulldogs have won 33 consecutive home games, the longest active streak in college football. They are the only team in the country to finish in the top 7 of the final AP poll each of the past eight seasons and own the longest winning streak in SEC history, 29 straight games from 2021-23.

He’s produced more NFL first-round draft picks (20) than he’s lost games at Georgia (19). That’s after having just one player drafted following his first season at Georgia, receiver Isaiah McKenzie in the fifth round. In the last three drafts alone, the Bulldogs have produced 31 NFL draft picks, eight of those going in the first round.

“Georgia is the standard for watching teams practice, the way they practice and the way their players are coached and developed,” one NFL personnel director told On3. “There are very few ready-made players when they get to the NFL, but when you get a kid out of Georgia, you almost always know what you’re getting and that they’re going to be prepared.”

The two coaches who’ve been with Smart the entire time at Georgia, strength and conditioning director Scott Sinclair and defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann, said Smart has been brilliant with the way he’s blended the blueprint he brought with him from Alabama while working under the legendary Nick Saban and meshing that blueprint to fit Smart’s own identity.

It’s an identity that continues to evolve with one recurring theme: Never settle.

“He has a standard and expectation that permeates throughout the building, and it doesn’t matter if you are an assistant athletic trainer, linebackers coach, strength coach or if you’re a GA in nutrition,” Sinclair said. “Everybody knows what the standard is, and he set that bar high. If you’re not upholding that standard, you’re going to hear about it.

“If you don’t like being the hunter and going out and being great every single day, you’re not going to fit in this program.”

Schumann has been with Smart since Schumann was a student at Alabama and started there as an undergraduate analyst for the Crimson Tide in 2008. Schumann was in a player development/personnel role at Alabama when Smart brought him to Georgia in 2016 as inside linebackers coach and worked his way up to defensive coordinator.

“Each year, he’s challenged himself and leaned into who he is, and his personality is all over this place,” said Schumann, who turned down an opportunity to be the Philadelphia Eagles’ defensive coordinator two years ago to remain at Georgia. “He demands things are done the right way, but he also really leans into the people in the organization, whether it’s the players, the staff or sports science team. I think that’s where he has evolved the most because in Year 1, it was more like, ‘Hey, here’s how we’re going to do it.’ And with each year, things have changed, and it shows his trust in the people around him and his constant desire to get better.”

Smart is not big on the whole CEO label. However, he’s the first to admit that he delegates more now than he ever used to, freeing him up to deal with player management, player retention (perhaps the key in today’s transient world of college football), mindset training with his players and even fundraising.

“I tried my first three or four years, I don’t know how long it was, to do everything, be involved in everything and know every decision,” Smart said. “I probably handcuffed my staff members from doing their own job, and I’ve grown in that. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable in not having to be involved in everything.”

Coaches are renowned for their stubbornness, and Smart is no exception. But he’s also a better listener than he’s given credit for.

“He doesn’t want a bunch of yes men,” Schumann said. “But, hey, when we’re going and it’s time to go, we’re all pointed in the same direction and doing things the same way. That’s part of what has allowed him to continue to get better because he’s able to digest that information without automatically just giving into people’s demands even when he thinks that something needs to be done. Some guys go down this path where they start listening to everybody. They get lost in all that feedback, but not Kirby.”

Nobody knows Smart better than his wife of 19 years, Mary Beth Smart, who played basketball at Georgia under Andy Landers and met Smart in 2005 while working in the athletic association’s business office. They were never in school together at Georgia, but she was the one who booked Smart’s flight when he flew in for his interview with Mark Richt for the running backs job, and then booked the next one when he was hired.

“The communication opened up because he had to call me then,” Mary Beth said laughing. “He was flying all over the place recruiting. It was a busy time, and we talked pretty much every day. It just sorta went from there with us.”

The same goes for these last 10 years. The word Mary Beth would use is “special” in that they were able to return to their alma mater and share in national championships.

“Plural,” she added with emphasis.

“So many people take so much pride in Georgia football,” Mary Beth said. “So much of their joy comes from what Kirby puts on the field, the wins and losses. So there’s a lot of pressure in many ways on him, but he genuinely loves what he’s doing. I think it would be hard to keep doing this job with as much pressure as there is and the time away from your own family if you didn’t love it.”

Smart was always a natural to return to Georgia at some point, even though he had other opportunities when he was coaching at Alabama. Richt tried to hire him as Georgia’s defensive coordinator in 2010, but Smart stayed put. He was a finalist for the Auburn head job in 2013 when Gus Malzahn was hired, and Smart was also offered the South Carolina job before Richt was fired in 2015. Part of what happened at Auburn was that Alabama was in the 2012 national championship game, and Smart was going to stay on as DC through the Jan. 7, 2013 game. Auburn officials weren’t comfortable waiting that long, even though former Auburn head coach Pat Dye said later that his choice would have been Smart.

“It was really close at Auburn,” Smart said.

Close enough that Mary Beth said they went shopping for a tie that was Auburn’s shade of orange. But nothing was a better fit than returning to Georgia, although Smart likes to joke that there’s no grace granted to alumni at the top of college football.

“It’s not like, ‘Oh well, he’s one of us,’ if you don’t win,” Smart said.

While the fans celebrate the wins and championships, Mary Beth celebrates Smart’s commitment to being a husband and a dad, despite being pulled in so many different directions. Their twins, Weston and Julia, are seniors in high school, and their youngest son, Andrew, is 13 years old. He starred in the Little League World Series last year and also plays football.

Fiercely competitive just like his dad, Andrew hears about it from his dad when that competitiveness spills overboard. However, Mary Beth said nobody in the family is really keen on losing. It’s a shared family gene.

“I appreciate having a partner that puts his family first and how present he is as a dad,” Mary Beth said. “Sometimes it’s only by text if he’s working, but our kids are constantly shooting texts off, asking for permission to do things or letting us know what’s going on. And as far as being present at games, if he’s not working, he’s there.”

Smart said he’s probably more nervous watching Andrew’s games than he is for any of his games.

“I just put a towel over my head and watch,” Smart said. “I get nervous for him.”

The image most fans have of Smart is him running up and down the sideline wildly gesturing to his players or officials with his visor getting a little more crooked by the quarter.

“Here at home, he sits there with his reading glasses on. That’s something that has changed in 10 years,” Mary Beth quipped.

Smart doesn’t turn 50 until December. He’s already the SEC’s second-longest tenured coach behind Mark Stoops, who’s in his 13^th season at Kentucky. As he entered this season, Smart said it hit him that he’s now been at Georgia longer than he was at Alabama, where he worked for nine years under Saban.

“Sometimes, I think about it, and it seems so long ago when I think about Lorenzo Carter, Nick Chubb and Sony Michel to now,” Smart said. “And then sometimes, I think, ‘Man, it’s flown by.’ ”

Georgia redshirt junior defensive lineman Christen Miller said he wants to leave Georgia with a national championship and “give Coach Smart another one on my way out.”

“He definitely ain’t done,” Miller said. “He’s got 20 or more years in him for sure.”

Which begs the question: Will Smart still be coaching into his 70s like his former boss?

“Probably not,” Smart said convincingly.

He can certainly see going into his 60s, but his 70s might be a stretch.

“I look at Nick and I look at the way he’s wired, and he was wired to where he could do that. He could probably still do it now,” Smart said. “I have so many things I want to do, so many things that I want to experience and enjoy that I haven’t gotten an opportunity to because of the grind and the climb. I don’t see it going that long. But health permitting, I’ll be doing something.”

Jim Donnan, who coached Smart at Georgia and remains close to the program, said Smart’s vision, drive and persistence to improve facilities and help bring in the money to catch Georgia back up with everybody else in the SEC has been one of Smart’s most enduring legacies.

“He fortified this place, connected people,” Donnan said. “We were lacking in some areas, and Kirby was able to get the kind of support from the president, the AD back then, all the donors, to make a couple of changes that we needed. We didn’t have an indoor practice facility. We didn’t have a recruiting area at the stadium. He helped get a new building built for football, so you’re talking about over a hundred million dollars in improvements.”

And then on the field, the Bulldogs have also cashed in. Donnan loves to tell the story of one of his neighbors, who shared with him about his daughter’s four-year experience in Georgia. During those four years, she never experienced a loss to Auburn, Florida, Georgia Tech or Tennessee, never experienced a loss at home, and was in school for two national championships.

“That’s a hell of a career,” Donnan said.

About the only thing Smart hasn’t done is figure out the team his Bulldogs will line up against Saturday night. He’s just 1-6 against Alabama, but this will be the first time Smart has faced Alabama in Athens as Georgia’s coach. Ironically, the last time Alabama came to Athens was in 2015 when Smart was the Alabama defensive coordinator and the Crimson Tide routed the Bulldogs 38-10.

Not counting Smart’s first season at Georgia, when the Bulldogs finished 8-5 overall and 4-4 in the SEC, he’s lost just 10 games to SEC opponents in eight seasons, and six of those have been to Alabama – four in either the SEC championship game or national championship game.

Even before this season, Smart predicted the parity in the SEC would be as great as we’ve seen it. He also said the Bulldogs weren’t as deep as in past years. It’s much more difficult for teams like Georgia, Alabama and Ohio State to stockpile players now with other schools working the transfer portal.

Plus, in addition to the 31 players lost to the NFL draft the past three years, there are seven to 10 players who’ve transferred from Georgia in the last two years that are either starting or playing significant snaps at other schools.

The transactional nature of recruiting in the NIL world of college football is not something Smart necessarily enjoys, but he’s proactive with his players during the season. Just like recruiting players out of high school, he’s brutally honest with his own players during the retention process.

“We explain to the kids here what we can do, and we proactively have these conversations probably four or five times a year on my calendar,” Smart said. “We’re going to sit down and talk about where we are with the kids on the roster, and that can come at really awkward times because it also happens in the season and may not be exactly what they want to hear, but at least there’s a little transparency there. I think we retain more kids because of that honesty. But we also don’t get into battles that overextend us or are going to put a kid above a kid that’s here doing a good job and starting. We simply say, ‘We can’t do that. We can’t go there, and if you can get more money elsewhere, we respect it.’”

Motivating players in the NIL era has also created a trickier dynamic for Smart – all coaches, for that matter — although he remains firm on one truism.

“If you don’t love football, you’re going to have a hard time here,” said Smart, noting that those players who don’t genuinely love football had better be mega talented if they’re going to make it at Georgia.

Miller said there shouldn’t be any confusion about what Georgia football is or isn’t under Smart for those players coming into the program.

“They know what this place is about. They see the practices. They see how Coach Smart coaches you,” Miller said. “Georgia makes you a man, and not a lot of people can handle that. It ain’t no dream playing for Coach Smart, but he tells you that up front. When I was getting recruited, I had Coach Smart to the right and then I had everybody else to the left telling me how good I am and filling my head up with lies.

“Now, don’t get me wrong. He’s got a lot of personality. He’s a charismatic guy, and he’s crazy. But I’m a little crazy too.”

One of the best shows on Georgia’s campus each spring and fall is dubbed “Kirby on the Mic.” Well, maybe it’s not really a show in the traditional sense, but practices with Smart barking on the microphone have become the stuff of legends and are wildly entertaining and definitely R-rated.

Smart said the whole “Kirby on the Mic” narrative is overrated and that it began as a way to better organize practice, but those who’ve starred in the show know better.

Senior cornerback Daylen Everette swears that Smart has bionic vision.

“He’ll be on the other field looking at the offense, like 100 yards away, and you’ll hear him over the mic jumping on you,” Everette said. “You’re like, ‘Bro, how does he even see that?’ But he does. He doesn’t miss anything or let anything slide.”

Just across the road from the Butts-Mehre football complex is Barrow Elementary School, and Everette joked that he always hopes the kids aren’t out for recess when the team is practicing.

“Because they’re going to hear it all, probably a lot of words they don’t want to hear,” he said laughing.

Overrated or not, even Smart has his favorite “Kirby on the Mic” moment. He was at an event this summer when a woman approached him about her daughter, who had just graduated from Georgia.

“She was telling me about her highlight in college, and I thought she was going to tell me it was the speaker at commencement, the party they had for graduation, her GPA, something like that,” Smart recounted.

Nope, it was that her daughter lived about two blocks from the practice field and that she would go out in the afternoon when she was stressed about school or worried about something and listen to Kirby on the mic.

“She said it made her feel so much better that she wasn’t at football practice,” Smart said sheepishly. “I was like, ‘Wow!”

Smart is always teaching, even his coaches. Sinclair, whose only connection to Smart when he was hired was having worked with longtime Alabama head trainer Jeff Allen at UCF, received an earful from Smart several years ago at a youth camp. It’s an ass-chewing (yes, there’s that word again) that has stuck with Sinclair ever since.

Sinclair was spacing out the campers two yards apart as they were stretching and ended up running out of room. Smart came running over and wanted to know what the problem was.

“I told him, ‘Coach, I was just doing what I was told,’ and he lost it on me,’ ” Sinclair recalled. “It’s probably the best lesson I could have learned.”

Smart’s message: Don’t blame somebody else. Fix the problem.

“That’s the way it is with everything we do in this program, and I’ve used that with my own coaches and interns,” Sinclair said. “Don’t tell me what the problem is. Fix it. Get it corrected and don’t let it happen again.”

Smart has used Drew Brannon, a sports psychologist partnered with AMPLOS and based in Greenville, South Carolina, since 2020. Brannon had worked with Georgia athletes in the past, and Smart left the 2020 COVID season feeling as if something was missing in his program.

“Don’t underestimate the difference that made,” said Neyland Raper, who was Smart’s former director of football operations before taking a job as the Big 12’s director of football operations and competition. “We had skull sessions with the players where they got up and told their stories. We formed small groups, and we did surveys with the players, trying to find more connectivity. You could see it transforming.”

Those skull sessions have continued to pay dividends, leading to the team’s mantra of “Mudita,” which was introduced to the team during a summer retreat last summer. It’s a Sanskrit word for finding joy in the success of others.

“When Coach Smart came here, he had to figure out, ‘OK, I want to build this big house, but how can I build it?’” said Miller, admittedly a skeptic when Georgia first implemented the skull sessions. “He knew he had to have a certain foundation, and once he got that foundation built, y’all see them championships start to roll in. Y’all see the winning culture start to come in. He was able to build his house because the foundation was set. The skull sessions were a big part of that, that connection. That’s why we win those tough games. I know what my brother is fighting for. I know what he’s going through. I know where he came from. I know his story. I know what makes him mad. I know what makes him sad.

“We’re going to fight different.”

This is Smart’s first season without his father, Sonny, who died in January at the age of 76. He fell while walking in New Orleans days before the Sugar Bowl and broke his hip. He died following complications from surgery. It was two days after Georgia’s season-ending 23-10 loss to Notre Dame.

“He was a man of few words,” said Smart, who was coached by his father in high school. “He never wanted to be in the limelight. He would be on the bench. It’s so funny. He wanted to be on the sidelines. He hated being in the stands listening to all the armchair quarterbacks and the criticism. He never once called me and said, ‘Did y’all think about running this or doing this?’ He stayed so far out of the football part of it.

“But there was a quiet confidence about him, and I drew on that. We all did.”

It’s the kind of confidence that’s contagious, and as Smart charges headfirst into the teeth of his 10^th year at his alma mater, winning has also become contagious.