Ryan Day, Kirby Smart detail schedule for night before playoff game

No. 1 Georgia and No. 4 Ohio State have very similar preparation and routines ahead of the College Football Playoff semifinals down at the Peach Bowl. Kirby Smart and Ryan Day focused on keeping their squads as locked in as possible and not changing anything out of the ordinary.

Georgia has the “home field advantage,” if one wants to call it that since the game takes place in Atlanta. It might be more familiar territory for the defending national champions, but Day and the Buckeyes know what to do, having been in the playoff just two seasons ago.

“We’ll keep our routine the same,” Day said Friday. “We tried to keep this week like a game week and less like a bowl week. Like you said, we have our walk throughs. We have our meetings. We have our night together on Friday. We call it best Fridays in football. It will be a long day, getting ready for this game and 8:00 kickoff.

“So we try to do the best we can at keeping the routine the same, and that’s meetings, walkthrough over at the stadium, and we come together for dinner, movies, watch some football, and then get to bed.”

Smart echoed his opposing coach’s statement about preparing for the biggest game of the year to date.

“Very similar,” Smart said of Georgia’s routine. “We keep the same routine. We keep it home and treat it like a road game in terms of we would be arriving today. We want them to have a mindset of they arrived today. That’s one of the hardest things psychologically to prepare your team for from being in the same place for six, seven days, sometimes in the same room.

“So psychologically, we try to do some things to help with that, and then we treat it like we arrived. We go do a walkthrough. We do a movie and prepare for a big day tomorrow.”

If the game gets into shootout mode, it could favor Ohio State’s high-powered offense. C.J. Stroud, a two-time Heisman finalist, had another solid regular season.

In 12 games, Stroud had 3,340 yards, 37 touchdowns, six interceptions and a 66.2% completion percentage.

But Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett saw this movie before, having won the national championship last season.

This year, Bennett had 3,425 yards, 20 touchdowns, six interceptions and a 67.9% completion percentage.

No. 1 Georgia (13-0) takes on No. 4 Ohio State (11-1) in the College Football Playoff semifinals at the Peach Bowl Dec. 31 at 8:00 p.m. ET.