Georgia staying centered, consistent with perfection as purpose

ATHENS, Ga. — Halfway through November, Georgia is 10-0 and already has its spot in the SEC Championship Game secured with two regular season games still to go. The Bulldogs are the reigning National Champions and ranked No. 1 in the country in all three of the major polls (AP, Coaches, College Football Playoff). Life is pretty good if you are a member of the Georgia football program.

However, Kirby Smart and his team don’t seem to want to celebrate themselves just yet. There wasn’t a big party in the locker room on Saturday night after beating Mississippi State to clinch the SEC East, nor was there a ton of eagerness to rest on the laurels of taking down the top-ranked Tennessee Volunteers the week before. Nope, this team wanted to put both of those accomplishments behind them as quickly as possible and move on to the next challenge in their pursuit of bigger things ahead of them, potentially even perfection.

“I mean, it’s the pitfall of every profession or everything people do in society: being able to repeat habits and can you do that, can you do what you do better than the people in your profession on a daily basis and not get bored with monotony,” Smart said on Monday, asked about his team’s every-day pursuit to be the best. “It’s hard to sustain anything in life, in your career, whatever it is. And if you want to be the best sports writer, you want to be the best broadcaster, you got to do it better than the other people in your profession. You got to do that by recreating yourself, by consistently outworking someone, and sometimes people get comfortable. When you get comfortable, you don’t always, you’re not always at your best. We’re trying our best to be at our best. That’s our job. The challenge is how do you do that better than the team you’re up against.”

Only a handful of teams in Georgia program history have finished an entire season undefeated before. Last year’s group went without a loss in the regular season, the first time since 1982 that the Bulldogs were able to accomplish that. That year was an 11-game regular season however, meaning that 2021 was the first time Georgia had hit the 12-0 mark on a year in the regular season. That 12-0 record didn’t last long though as the 2021 team fell in the SEC Championship Game, and even though they bounced back to finish the season on top of the College Football world, there still was that one loss, leaving the 1980 (12-0), 1946 (11-0) and 1920 (8-0) teams as the undefeated seasons in school history.

Georgia has a long way to go before it gets there – five games to be exact – if it is to accomplish that feat. Kirby Smart wouldn’t even look ahead two games down the road to the set opponent of LSU in the SEC Championship, so you know he isn’t thinking at all about a 15-0 season. He makes sure that his team isn’t either, comparing the entire season to a single game or a single drive to remind them that the job’s not finished.

“Keep talking re-centering, coming back to the purpose and what we started all this about,” Smart said when asked how he keeps his team from getting too comfortable amidst all the success they are having. “We did have the good fortune of not a lot of these guys were major parts of the run that went on last year, so it was new for a lot of them. The energy and enthusiasm towards making a mark themselves and creating their own identity was the lead factor. And sustaining that is now we’re getting in the fourth quarter. We’re at the 15, 20 yard line like trying to go finish off the regular season and that’s got to be sustained. So far, they have had a good attitude and they have approached each week independent of the previous.”

Georgia goes on the road this week to Kentucky. The Wildcats (6-4, 3-4 SEC) are coming off of a loss to Vanderbilt this past Saturday. Kickoff time from Kroger Field in Lexington is set for 3:30 p.m. ET on CBS.