WATCH: Kirby Smart explains steps for Georgia improvement during bye week

ATHENS, Ga. — Kirby Smart speaks in-person with reporters just once this week. That happened on Tuesday night after UGA came off the practice field.

Georgia is without a game this Saturday, and that means the Bulldogs’ emphasis is improvement. Smart knows that as well as anybody and detailed where – and how – the Dawgs can get better. Other topics like the health of his team and new NIL rules were also discussed.

DawgsHQ was on hand to hear what Smart had to say. A full transcript can be found below while videos of both the ninth-year head coach and a trio of Georgia players can be found on our YouTube channel!

Kirby Smart on the report that Tate Ratledge is going to have surgery and that Carson Beck is dealing with an AC joint sprain…

“Yeah, I don’t know where all that’s coming from. We’ve got like seven AC joint sprains, so that’s not like a significant or major injury. Carson’s fine. He’s practiced both days. Tate does have an ankle. He’s had tightrope (surgery) already, and he’s in the rehab process already. We checked the night of the game and had to get it fixed and he’s getting it fixed already. He’ll be back as soon as he can. Expect a healthy and full recovery.”

Smart on what stands out about Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins…

“His work ethic. He’s done a great job. He talked to the team today about where he was in terms of his mental space when he was a young player and obviously thought he should be playing more. It’s funny ’cause he’s matured so much from the time he was like, I should be starting, I should be playing, to realizing that he wasn’t ready and that he needed to get better. And unfortunately he didn’t get to play a lot last year because of injury, but he has been able to play a lot this year, and he’s doing a really good job.”

Smart on how often Georgia coaches get on the staff with other coaches and ask what they saw and how they prepared for UGA…

“It doesn’t work real good when you play them the next year.”

Smart on the NIL executive order that Georgia governor Brian Kemp passed Tuesday…

“Appreciative. We want to be competitive as we can be in our field of endeavor. It’s this world we live in, and it’s not just us, apparently. I mean, it’s the whole state of Georgia, USG. I’m very appreciative of Governor Kemp and his staff for allowing us to be competitive and putting us on a level playing field and to continue to support our student-athletes. This is going to benefit the student athletes and very appreciative of them supporting that and getting it done.”

Kirby Smart on if he’s addressed the team after Daniel Harris‘ arrest and why this continues to happen…

“Because we continue to have guys make poor decisions, you know? It’s very unfortunate. I know that our staff, myself, continue to drive home the sensitive nature of it. It’s certainly a deadly speed when you talk about the speed that he was traveling at. You want kids to grow up. You want to treat them like your own kids. You want them to grow up and make good decisions and learn from other’s mistakes. We have guys share, and yeah, we obviously continue to talk to them, but it hasn’t stopped it. We’ve got to find a way to do it.”

Smart on injury updates for Mykel Williams, Warren Brinson and Jordan Hall…

“They’re all working to come back. They’re all doing the rehab process. Warren’s really close. Warren’s out there doing stuff now. Mykel’s running, Jordan’s running, so we’re hopeful to get those guys back.”

Smart on the need to start faster, what coaches can do to facilitate that…

“There’s so many steps, I mean, there’s tons of them. Clean up what you do, do it at a higher rate, make good decisions, communicate better. It’s hard to say one thing on that, because there’s a lot of things that – not a lot of things go wrong, but one thing going wrong can mess up a play, and it takes one person messing up an offense, and if one person messes up consecutively, you’ve got three bad plays.

Certainly, you just got to execute better and do a good job with guys doing what they do in practice. If we do what we do in practice and we do it against good people, which they get a chance to do it against real good people in practice, they’ll do it better. So I don’t know if we can point to one thing on that.”

Smart on offensive line after Ratledge left the game…

“We play Micah (Morris) a lot, right? So we have three guards that play. That’s why we do that, because there’s a chance of injury, so we play three guys. I didn’t see a lot different from him going out. Micah stepped in and played. Micah probably had to play more than he typically does. He and Dylan (Fairchild) did a good job.”

Kirby Smart on what this team gains from having first road test under their belt…

“I don’t know. It’s better than not having it under your belt. I certainly would like to have played better, really the entire – special teams, offense, defense – so that you gain more confidence for playing on the road. But I’m glad we got a road game under our belt, because it’s tough in the SEC to go on the road. I’ve repeatedly said that, and I believe that. It’s hard any time you go play, especially when you got a team coming off a tough loss. So I’m glad we got that done, but how much confidence it shows is basically based on what you do this week and how well you prepare.”

Smart on Beck’s decisions he has to make at the line of scrimmage…

“He has to make decisions, but he doesn’t have to make – it’s really complicated. I mean, I’d be sitting here for an hour talking about football. There’s plays that versus certain looks he has to check. So the play comes in, it’s a run, he has to check to a pass. The play comes in, it’s a pass, he has to check to a run. But then there’s some plays that are checked run to run. There’s some plays that are checked protection. So they’re a pass, and he changes the protection based on it. There’s some plays that are a run that he has to decide which way the run goes and whether he throws the ball on the run to the RPO.

So if you’re asking about checking plays, yeah, he has the ability to check some plays and some plays he doesn’t. Some he has to do based on what the defense is doing, but it’s complicated.

Carson does a great job of understanding that and knowing what to do and getting hats on people. That’s why the run game is so critical. The best friend you have on the road in those environments is the run game. When you don’t run the ball well, you better be dang good at something.”

Smart on how much the bye week approach has evolved over time…

It’s always about improvement. I mean, we’re better never rests, like we’re trying to get better all the time. So I’ve never had a bye week that I’ve ever had in all my years coaching that it wasn’t about improvement. It’s about detailing that improvement and how are you gonna attack it? Are you gonna do the same thing you’ve done every year? Well, you may not have the same team. You may not have the same special teams. You may have different needs from one year to the next, and we kind of cater our off week to what we need. And that’s not all based on Kentucky, that’s based on Tennessee Tech, that’s based on Clemson, that’s based on injuries, it’s based on improvement. We change the schedules each bye week to fit, to suit what we need.

Smart on what Trevor Etienne has brought to the offense… 

“Toughness, great leadership, competitor, Trevor’s one of the best guys. I can’t imagine what kind of leader he would be if he’d been in the program the whole time because he’s not afraid to speak out and talk and speak up, and I respect that about him. Because he hasn’t had not even a full year with these guys, but he’s not afraid to speak up, and he’s a tremendous leader in toughness. So that’s what I’ve seen out of him, and I think he’s getting into playing shape. I think it hurt him some, not playing in that first game, and then he played not lot in the second game, and then he played a lot in the third game. And I’ve challenged him conditioning-wise going into that game. I thought he might get more action than he had, and he did, and he took advantage of it.

Kirby Smart on the Georgia offensive line and its size…

“I don’t know that I would agree with your assessment because we don’t necessarily go after heavy, we go after size, size means a lot of things, right? So Amarius Mims is our heaviest guy, but he’s the lowest body fat, and they seem to look like him. So he’s 350 pounds and 16, 17% body fat, which I think’s a model offensive lineman.

I want all offensive linemen to be nimble, but if they’re nimble and they get knocked back, then they’re not as effective. And I’ll be honest with you, the pro game is a little different than our game right now. They also have more starting quarterbacks out in the last two years than ever. So with that said, I don’t know that they can find the right protectors to protect the quarterback.”

Smart on if Georgia’s decision to emphasize developing depth during fall camp has affected chemistry early on…

“You all ran with that and said that we didn’t care about chemistry. No, when you try to gain depth, you practice a lot of people. Not necessarily with the ones. You practice a lot of people. We do ones, twos, and threes. When the ones go, the ones go. When the twos go, the twos go. When the threes go, the threes go.

We got a group of three offensive linemen that are five guys that are all true freshmen. They need lots of practice, because guess what they’re gonna be next year? Twos. So they need lots of practice.

They gotta get lots of reps, because they’re gonna be our twos, and we’ve never had that before. We’ve always had this thing where it was like threefold. It was like the guys, and then it was like the Dylan Fairchilds and the Micah (Morris)s and the guys coming up. And then it was like the freshmen. Well, now we don’t have that. So when I talk about chemistry and getting things going, 100%.

Now, we didn’t have a complete receiving core in camp. I mean, (London) Humphreys missed a little bit. (Colbie) Young missed a little bit, because he had this injury, that injury. We had Trevor miss a little time there. We had somebody else, I forget who it was, miss a little bit, sometimes a little bit. But that has nothing to do with the other.

You wanna attribute it to something? Attribute it to what I think is two pretty dang good defenses, and us not being at our best against Kentucky, and we gotta improve that. But it’s nothing to do with the preseason camp, I can assure you of that.”

Smart on the need for NIL legislation and if they have lost recruits because of it…

“I don’t know, I really don’t know how to answer that. I mean, it’s all about what you have available, right? And some people are willing to spend beyond their ability to raise it. Like, unfulfilled promises. Like, we’re not going to have unfulfilled promises where guys reach back out and say, well, they said they could do this and they didn’t. They said they could do that, and they didn’t. So we’ve lost some in those regards. But I don’t know that it was an inability to do it. It was not going to go step over our skis and put our body over it, put too much out there, and say, okay, we committed to this, and you can’t do it.

So it’s a hard world out there because you don’t really know what you can and can’t do. People make promises, and nobody has a bounty sitting out there that big that they can pay everybody that. And so you try to be judgmental, and you try to make good decisions on players. You want people in your program that are really not making it about just that. Because when it’s just about that, you don’t ever stop. And that’s not gonna change based on what the governor does, what the governor’s saying. It’s not like it’s going to be this open surplus. It’s just helping us be competitive with others. And I’m sure Georgia Tech feels the same way. We’re out there competing in a really competitive environment. And there’s times you feel like you want to do something and you can’t. And now, hopefully, we’ve got the capabilities to do what we need to do.” 

Smart on ways he wants to get better offensively…

“Communication would be one. When you look back at the game, there were some major communication errors there, talking about across the front, and communicating who we’re working to, points, and things like that. Which a lot of that, some of that has to do with being on the road and crowd noise, and everybody being on the same page. Protecting the quarterback on some pressures that are really easy pickups. Look, our offensive line, when you look across the country in three years, it’s hard to find teams that have cut one loose, like didn’t block somebody. That’s just, knock on wood, that’s rare for us because we have a very experienced offensive line. And they see every pressure known to man from us. So that’s something that we do usually well, pick those things up. And they really did that well in the game. There was a couple times we didn’t, and we’ve got to do a better job of that. We’ve got to be able to hit some open guys when they’re open, and we’ve got to be able to do some things in the RPO game that help us. And there’s some things we missed in that. At the end of the day, when you lose momentum in those kind of games, you’ve got to grind them out and find a way. And we did not have momentum in that game, and it made it more difficult. But when you watch that tape, there are varied things you can point at and say, if we just do this, we’re gonna be this much better.” 

Kirby Smart on the rotation at center with Ratledge out…

“Well, Drew’s there, and you want to have three centers at all times. Malachi Toliver’s done a great job, the young kid. We made him into a center when we first got here, so he’s gotten to the point that he’s serviceable. He can go in, compete, he’s still a true freshman. We’ve got a couple other guys out there in the last two days snapping so that we got some help there. We always want to have three, we’ve got to have three. And we want to have three ready. We got two that we really feel solid about, and then we’ll have a third one here in the next couple days based on what we’re doing.”