Kirby Smart finds out how his team fights when facing adversity

ATHENS, Ga. — Early season games are important in figuring out the identity of a team. Saturday night as top-ranked Georgia needed a second-half comeback to beat South Carolina, head coach Kirby Smart thinks he took a step in the right direction in determining that for his team.

“I’m not relieved. I’m not ever relieved. I mean, my expectation is we go out and dominate and create a nightmare and make people want to never play you again. We didn’t do that today. We didn’t, like, make them never want us to play them again. But we did respond to adversity, and that’s all it is,” Smart said.

“It’s going to happen all over the country, guys,” he continued. “Go look. It’s going to happen all over the country. People have to play close games to get better, and the expectation that’s created of these teams that are the top-tier teams, it wasn’t created by them — it was created by perception. You are what you do on the field, and we are right now a team that has played three average first halves. I don’t know if they’re even average, but they had a response.”

Smart is absolutely right in calling Georgia’s first half average at best. The Bulldogs put up just three points in the first two frames, trailing 14-3 at the break. However, they scored 21 unanswered in the second half, taking the lead with 7:40 to go in the third quarter and never looking back.

“We went into the locker room and obviously hadn’t played the way we wanted to in the first half but came out with energy. We were composed, we were poised and just had to make a few plays,” quarterback Carson Beck said in his postgame assessment.

Georgia faced a similar situation early last season when it went on the road to Missouri. The Bulldogs were down 10 at the half to the Tigers and needed to score 17 of the final 20 points to leave Columbia with a win.

Smart said he referenced that Missouri game in the locker room at halftime. He saw that as something the team could fall back on knowing that they had been there before and overcome it. That’s an important element in being a championship caliber football team.

“Teams that are championship-caliber, they find a way when they don’t have their best game,” Smart said. “We’ve got to find out why we don’t. Why didn’t we have our best game? Because I certainly felt like we had great practices and like we improved.”

As for what it was that the team learned in the win, there was certainly a consistent theme among answers from Smart and Bulldog players. It all came down to resiliency and a willingness to continue fighting, even when things weren’t going their way.

“We’re resilient. We can stay composed and battle through tough fights,” defensive lineman Mykel Williams said when asked what he learned about this Georgia team.

“No moment can really bring us down,” wide receiver Dillon Bell added. “We came together as a brotherhood at the end of the day. Even when we were doing at halftime nobody was arguing. We were all nice and poised, ready to attack the next quarter.”

Cornerback Kamari Lassiter wasn’t surprised by the team’s response. In fact, it only reiterated what he already believed about the Bulldogs.

“It won over what I already thought I knew about the team,” Lassiter said. “We have a very resilient team, a team full of guys super connected and close knit. We have composure. Whenever we’re down, we’re never out.”

Offensive lineman Sedrick Van Pran, a captain on last year’s team and key component of this year’s leadership group as well, said it best.

“I think you learn really what your team is made of in terms of the way they come together,” Van Pran said. “Situations like this, there’s two ways it can go: it can either pull us apart from each other and start pointing fingers and blaming each other or they can come together, ‘Hey man, we got you. It’ll be alright. Next play, we got you.’ It’s those type of things that tell you what type of team you have, and I genuinely feel like today we were closer.”

Georgia has a one-week break from SEC play next week with UAB coming to town. After that, it’s seven straight games within the conference including a road trip to rival Auburn at the end of this month.

It’s likely that things won’t always be going perfectly during that stretch. However, Smart is hopeful that Saturday night – much like the Missouri game last season was for the 2022 team – can serve as something that this team can fall back on for belief they can overcome anything.

“Calm. Composure. We talk about our four DNA traits. When things get tough, that is what you do. You rely on your DNA traits,” Smart said. “I was pretty excited at half because I said, ‘We’re going to find out what kind of team we got. This is it, right here. This is our moment.’ We’ve had moments in other games and we’re going to win one moment at a time in the second half. No one is going to go out there and score a 14-point touchdown. You’re going to win one moment at a time, play-by-play. When we lose a moment, we have to win the next moment. And they kind of bought into that.”

“Did they answer the bell. There’s lots we can talk about at being better. Lots. Starting fast, starting better, what’s causing it, why are we doing it? The world has questions on all these things, but I found out a lot more about my team today than I did any other day this year,” he added. “I’m thrilled that when I came in the locker room, they were committed to each other talking about what we have to do better. Offense was over here, defense was over there, nobody was bickering. We were in complete control, calm amongst the storm. They responded.”