Georgia is winning big again but with different traits
Place Georgia’s 2021 and 2022 teams side by side and there are a lot of similarities. The 2022 Bulldogs are scoring a tad more. The 2021 Bulldogs gave up a tad less.
The number of wins is the game, the number of losses is the same, and UGA is back in the SEC Championship with a chance to earn the rare 15-0 season. Georgia didn’t get that done last year. We all know the story with the loss to Alabama and the victory in the rematch.
What we do know that is while these two teams, Kirby Smart’s sixth and seventh as the Bulldogs’ head coach, look similar on paper, they’re quite different. The sum is still great but the parts have changed.
“I don’t have an explanation for why we might not play with the consistency,” Smart said on Monday. “I think every coach would say the number one trait they want to have is consistency in performance, and we really haven’t had consistency in performance, maybe not as much as the team the year before has had. But what they have had is resiliency, competitiveness, pridefulness, and response mechanism has been pretty positive.”
Those traits are earned. Smart spoke earlier this season about how he wanted the Bulldogs to build their composure muscle. That has since given way to pulling a composure card, but the metaphor rings true.
Georgia used winter and summer workouts, spring drills, and preseason camp to strengthen its resiliency, competitiveness, and pridefulness.
Unlike the 2021 group, these Bulldogs have had to play from behind a time or two. They’ve had to power through some tough road environments with the bullseye on their backs, a bullseye placed there by those key standouts from a year ago. If you want to win National Championships, you have to take the not as good with the good.
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Consistency from Georgia sounds like a nightmare for its opponents. If the Bulldogs were to figure out how to show up each week like it did against Tennessee, Oregon, and South Carolina, the rest of College Football might be in trouble. But that’s something that every program has wrangled with for years. The ones who do the best job with it are the biggest winners, ahem, Nick Saban, ahem.
The Bulldogs are inching in that direction. There was a level of consistency during Smarts first few years as head coach. It was high-level, too. The bar has been raised and the Bulldogs have developed the championship DNA plus the reputation that goes with it.
It’s a truly unattainable goal, to be perfect in that or any other area, but the pursuit is what drives the man in charge of it all.
“Just I think consistency in performance, wanting to do things the right way and having a process you go through to do it and do it for these kids, these kids that sacrifice so much time and effort in our program,” Smart said. “I really just want to serve them and serve the University of Georgia the right way. There’s a right way to do things, and I think that we try to do it the right way here, which is calculated, a plan, and consistent.”
