Georgia head coach Kirby Smart remains tough to please
Life certainly seems to be quite good for Kirby Smart. He enters his seventh head coaching season as the leader of a National Championship football program. The Georgia head man just signed a 10-year contract extension that’ll pay him an average of more than $11 million per year and his team just walloped Oregon in the season opener by a score of 49-3 while the nation watched.
But if you’re expecting him to be all smiles and content, you’ve got the wrong guy. For better or worse, probably the former when it comes to leading a College Football program, Smart just isn’t the type to sit back and enjoy things too much.
When he met with reporters on Monday, he seemed a little perturbed. The same can be said for his press conference on Tuesday when one of the first things out of his mouth was how his team had just had maybe its worst practice since Georgia kicked things off with preseason camp in early August.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that once he studied that beatdown of Oregon, he wasn’t buckled in on cloud nine like so many others who love the UGA program.
“Well you just watch the tape,” Kirby Smart said on 92.9 The Game’s ‘The Steakhouse’ with Steak Shapiro and Rusty Mansell on Wednesday. “The tape is always the one that tells you the truth. The old adage in high school football forever, the big eye in the sky doesn’t lie and when you watch the tape, you see a lot of mistakes. We got some breaks and we got some very fortunate turnovers. Even the opening drive on offense, it seemed great, we scored, we had a bunch of mistakes on there. So it’s just things you can clean up. I didn’t know that then, but I know it after watching the tape.”
The demeanor is nothing new for successful football coaches. Watch press conferences from all NFL and college coaches and you’ll see plenty of the same.
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Most of those guys know that they can’t afford to take their foot off the proverbial pedal. Sure, they can have fun and enjoy what they’re doing. Most, if not all, of them do. Why else, other than money, would they work 80 to sometimes 100 hours a week?
The name of the game is winning. Smart has mentioned on more than one occasion how he values the relationships and mentorships more than anything else, but the opportunity to create those disappears if he’s not successful.
But back to that worst practice Kirby Smart spoke of on Tuesday, it probably wasn’t as bad as you might think. You see, while Smart wasn’t happy with that practice and he had no issue making that feeling known, things must be put in the proper context. It’s all about the standard.
“No, we didn’t have a very good practice,” Smart said as the interview on 92.9 concluded. “Now we’ve had very good practices, that’s the problem. So for it to be the worst, it doesn’t have to be terrible. It just wasn’t as good as the others.”
