Kirby Smart, Kelee Ringo speak on Georgia development process
ATHENS, Ga. — After Saturday’s game against Tennessee, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart was asked what the recipe for replacing as much talent as the Dawgs have done is. For Smart, it’s simple: recruiting. And yes, he’s right. You have to be able to recruit the right players in order to get them on campus. The reality is though, recruiting is only worth so much if there’s no development, and that’s something that Smart and company have done a stellar job at as well.
“We recruit based on talent and instinct and character. Things like that. But you develop everybody that comes here,” Smart said on Monday. “When they come, they become part of the development. We teach our scheme. We teach our scheme in the spring. We teach it in the summer. We teach it again in fall camp. And then we teach it again throughout the season. And the more you teach and the more you expand someone’s brain, the more information they can handle. And we try to push the limits of the expansion so that they can hold more and they can do more.”
“It doesn’t matter where they come from, when they get here, what age they are, or what their rating was, we just take the guys that choose to be part of it and we try to develop them,” he continued. “And whether you’re a first year, second year, or third year, fourth year, they get better. I mean, NFL scouts come, they want to see a player get developed. They want to see you’ve improved. They don’t say, ‘Well, your juniors are all good. They’re ready to go.’ No. There’s a lot of things they can get better at. There’s just more things the first-year and second-year guys can get better at. And we just try to prep the way that the young players get a lot of reps so they’re ready when their turn comes.”
That development is not just mental like the scheme implementation that Smart spoke of. There’s also a physical side where players have to accept the hard work and physicality that it takes to play football at the level Georgia routinely does.
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Take Kelee Ringo for example. The Tacoma, Wash. native was incredibly talented coming out of high school but still had an adjustment process he had to go through when he got to Georgia to get used to the expectations of the program, both from a physical and mental standpoint.
“One that we pride ourselves on is definitely toughness. It’s a huge part of our program, something that Kirby continues to instill into us each and every single day,” Ringo said. “If you look around at your teammates, you have to know that you can rely on them, and the way we practice every single day, we know that everybody is put through really hard times throughout the entire season, practice in training camp, summer workouts and everything like that. If you’re on the field, we look at you as a starter and know that you’re tough enough and capable of doing that we need us to be capable to do.”
Some audio from last week’s practice ahead of the Tennessee game was posted to Twitter late in the week. You could hear Smart and how hard he was on Ringo. However, based on the play on the cornerback in the game and the kind of praise Smart gave him afterwards, it’s easy to see that the out-of-place audio was just an example of tough love, something it takes adjusting to in order to play for Smart and this Georgia program. It’s not for everybody, but for the ones that are able to embrace it, they often are well rewarded.
