Houston Texans HC Demeco Ryans raves over Kirby Smart's Georgia football program
The Georgia football program is proud of it’s players who move on to the NFL. Like most other schools, the Bulldogs make a huge deal about draft night, they social media team is all over the NFL Draft and league games, pre-season and post-season. Rarely does Kirby Smart‘s program miss a chance to shout out one of its former players.
It’s rare, however, to have someone of prominence volunteer a short commercial for your program. If you said it was one of just 32 NFL head coaches on the planet, it’s even tougher to come by. But it happened for Georgia recently.
When asked about Kamari Lassiter, a guy the Houston Texans selected in the second round of the 2024 NFL Draft, second-year DeMeco Ryans, once an All-American linebacker at Alabama, had a lot to say about his young cornerback. That turned into a few glowing sentences about Georgia football and what it has become under Kirby Smart.
“For Kamari you can tell he’s built for this,” Ryans said. “Like when it comes to the mental toughness piece that plays a lot into being a good football player at this level, you have to be mentally tough. You have to have that next-play mentality and at Georgia, Kirby has done a great job, you can tell, of raising them the right way. Kirby has done a great job with all of his guys. Having those guys NFL ready to go and that’s one thing you see from Georgia, year after year since he has been there, those guys are plug and play type players, and it’s a credit to him and his program and how they run things there. You get a Georgia guy you know you’re getting an NFL player.”
The past few NFL Drafts, advertisements for college programs across America in their own right, have illustrated what Ryans is talking about. Smart is entering his ninth season at Georgia. His first NFL Draft as the UGA head coach was 2017 when just one Bulldog, Isaiah McKenzie, was taken. Things trended up, and quickly, for Georgia after that.
The next seven years saw 62 UGA players taken in the NFL Draft and 33 of those have come over the past three seasons. Smart has seen 17 of his players get taken in the first round of the NFL Draft. He has also witnessed a total of 35 players selected in the top three rounds.
“The draft, we had the draft and it was an honor to see the kids that played at UGA and I went in their homes and talked about getting a degree and becoming a man and having an opportunity to play in the National Football League. They realize that dream,” Smart said this spring. “I still get satisfaction from the guys who stick around, stay at Georgia, grow as men and become better people from having been in our program.”
