Kirby Smart, Georgia Bulldogs excited about opener

ATHENS, Ga. — The day has finally arrived. Football is back, and after that’s absolutely welcomed news in the Classic City. After a fall camp that many have described as the toughest of the Kirby Smart era, it’s time for the top-ranked Georgia Bulldogs to hit someone else. The team on the opposite side of that today? FCS level UT-Martin.

“Coach Simpson and his staff have done a tremendous job when you talk about conference champs, which they’ve been. A lot of their stats within their conference look very similar to ours in terms of being balanced, really good on offense and on defense,” Smart said this week. “We’ve played teams from that conference, and I know a lot of coaches in that conference. One of our coaches, Tray Scott, got his start there, his first job by Coach Simpson and worked — he knows their offensive coordinator really well. And they’ve done a tremendous job with their program building it from the ground up. They’ve got a great foundation laid. We’re excited to have them come in.”

“They are a well-coached, very good scheme team,” he added. “Offensively, they’re like everybody you play. There’s nobody that’s really different anymore. It’s more of the same. You don’t see a triple option. It’s like, okay, what do they do offensively? They’re very similar to everybody else. They’ve got the ability to throw the ball on the perimeter. They throw RPOs. They run the ball well. They have plays, they don’t block anybody in the interior and it doesn’t matter because the ball goes on the perimeter. So they do a good job of that. Defensively they’re similar to us. They can go three down, four down. They primarily go out of an odd look and a three-down look, and we get to look at that a lot because we do it defensively. So we share ideas in terms of schematics when you watch us and them and when you watch their conference you see some similarities there.”

The Skyhawks, who won the Ohio Valley Conference and participated in the FCS Playoffs just two years ago, bring with them a new starting quarterback and must replace both their leading rusher and receiver from last season.

Sam Franklin is expected to be the lead back after rushing 85 times for 676 yards and eight scores while DeVonte Tanksley would be the top name to watch with the wide receivers after he hauled in 53 passes for 653 yards. Both Franklin and Tanksley finished second in their respective categories.

“You don’t prepare for the guy, you prepare for the offense,” Smart said when asked about having limited film on the new starting quarterback and not knowing who the new playmakers might be for the Skyhawks. “When we go play somebody, we don’t prepare for the guy. We might try to find something out about him in terms of what did he do in high school, what does he excel at, what does he struggle with? Is he a guy that doesn’t read coverages as well? Is he a runner, not a runner? There’s all kinds of things we try to find out. But they have an offensive system, and they’ll cater to that offensive system to fit to his skill set. We go off of what they’ve done in the past and we’ll do a little bit of research on him as well.”

Ultimately for Smart, as it has been throughout his career, the emphasis is on his own team. While they’ll be hitting a different color on Saturday, the Bulldogs are only worried about themselves.

“We look at them schematically, and we try to figure out who they are, what they’ve done. You watch all their games. You worry about yourself. You try to improve the things you do yourself,” Smart said. “I think it’s really important, the first game of the year, we always look back at things that gave us problems because that’s probably what they’re looking at. You want to research and say, all right, what have they done well, what have they done poorly, what have we done well and what have we done poorly, because we’re going to see some of that.”

What is Smart looking for? He’s looking for execution on the little things. As UT-Martin’s Jason Simpson said, the scoreboard doesn’t show two-time defending national champions against an overmatched FCS opponent. Smart wouldn’t want it that way though.

“I think, procedurally, you haven’t had the play clock permanently on. We have it at practice, but it’s not the same. The first game is no different than the last game in terms of things that will get you beat, but I do think first game jitters exist,” Smart said. “You want the players to be able to get comfortable, go out and cut loose and play, and get the anxiety out of the way, get the first hit out of the way. I want to play our brand of football and play really disciplined, not have a lot of penalties and a lot of sloppy mistakes. Communication things, things where you just beat yourself, we’re trying to avoid.”

“With the way things are now, you could feel that way in the spring, and you could feel that way in the summer,” he added on the players being ready to play somebody else. “We do so many glorified walkthroughs. We try to change it up and break up the monotony, but I can’t pinpoint a day because you have to be willing to against each other and not let it become monotony. I told everybody today, that one rep of inside zone that you take today has to be the greatest rep of inside zone you’ve ever taken. That one stunt step you take as a defensive lineman has to be the best one you’ve ever taken. Repetition is the mother of all skill, and you’ve got to get a lot of reps to get good at it.”

Kickoff time for today’s game is set for 6:00 p.m. ET at Sanford Stadium, streaming exclusively on ESPN+ and SEC Network+.