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Kirby Smart addresses College Football's big picture questions

Palmber-Thombsby:Palmer Thombs•12/01/22•

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Photo by Tony Walsh

For the last few years, College Football has been in a cycle of questions. How are conferences going to look? What’s the best scheduling method? Is Playoff expansion happening, and if so, when? Don’t forget about NIL and the transfer portal too.

Slowly but surely the answers are coming to the forefront with the most recent of them coming Thursday morning. The College Football Playoff announced it will expand from its current four team format to 12 teams in 2024. The top-six-ranked conference champions will earn automatic bids while the other six spots will go to at-large teams. Four of those six conference champions will get byes while the other eight teams will play on-campus first round games.

Of course the announcement has its ripple affects. Now conferences, like the SEC, can go about figuring out how they want to schedule their regular seasons and eventually determine a champion. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Thursday that his focus is on a model without divisions to create more scheduling variability and to send the top two teams to Atlanta to play for the conference title. Georgia head coach Kirby Smart however? His focus isn’t on the big picture topics in today’s College Football world like the Playoffs and the transfer portal. Instead, he’s thinking about the present day and his team’s game on Saturday against LSU.

“We’re really focused on LSU, to be honest with you. That’s where our concentration is. We’ll deal with that when the time comes … That’s not really a conversation piece for us right now,” Smart said when asked what his program’s approach to the new transfer portal window, which opens on Monday, would be. “We have a process in our organization, we have different divisions. Everybody has a timeline for what they’re working on. We have player development staff, recruiting. We have all these facets within our organization that work their parts year-round. The most important right now is staffing our team, preparing for LSU. That’s really where our focus is.”

“I think only time will tell,” he added, asked for his general thoughts on the changing nature of College Football in light of the College Football Playoff’s announcement. “I read and see a lot of opinions out there. Length of games, number of games. I don’t think we’ll truly know. Like when we went to the four-game model, there were a lot of questions involved there, too. It’s not something I’ve got a huge opinion on right now, especially right now because of what we’re focused on. In the off-season I’ll think about it a lot more.”

Georgia and LSU kickoff the 2022 SEC Championship Game from Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Saturday at 4:00 p.m. ET. CBS will broadcast the game, the fifth meeting between these two teams with the conference crown on the line. LSU holds a 3-1 advantage in those prior matchups, including a 2019 victory over Smart’s Bulldogs, but Georgia enters as a large favorite for this one.

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