What Was Said: Kirby Smart after Georgia win over Tennessee

ATHENS, Ga. — Georgia head coach Kirby Smart had to be happy with that one. His Bulldogs beat the College Football Playoff committee’s top-ranked Tennessee Volunteers with a start-to-finish showing at Sanford Stadium. Georgia jumped on Tennessee and never looked back, winning 27-13. Here’s what Smart had to say after the game while meeting with media.

Kirby Smart Opening Statement

“What an incredible environment. I don’t know that I’ve ever —  I texted my wife — I’ve never seen our fans not leave the stadium like that, even when it rained. You know, Claude made a mention that the start of the second half, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house other than the ones they purchased. Our fans were elite today. We asked them to be. They responded, and they get the second-place vote. 

Players on this team were bought in, and they understood the plan, they executed the plan, they played extremely physical. They played without ego, and they played complementary football, which is always important. I’m really proud of the way our guys played. With that, I’ll open it up.”

Smart on the validation of having complementary football today

“Well, I don’t think we have to validate complementary football. We’ve played complementary football around here for a long time because I think that’s the way you should play football. We talked all week about hunting. Drew Brandon (?) gave our team an incredible message on Friday. He gave them a history lesson. But it was great for the players to hear it and buy in. They gained confidence as the week went on to the plan, and they executed well. You know, we still turned the ball over too much — some of that was on the weather conditions — but I was just so proud of how selfless the players were. Guys, we were a beat-up football team coming into this game. We had two O-linemen that really couldn’t go, didn’t practice all week. Ladd couldn’t go two days this week. Beefy went down during the game, Nolan was out. We had a lot of players dinged up, and a lot of guys stepped up to play for them.”

Smart on how aggressive the defensive game plan was today

“Well, they’ll never be not hung out when you play them. I mean, there’s not another way to do it. So, like, if you play them, you’re going to be hung out because you can’t put two people 45 yards from the ball — you can only put one. But our kids understood the plan and they stuck to the plan. The plan was really hard practice, lot of reps, lot of organization, lot of details in terms of how fast can we duplicate their speed, maybe even faster? Can we get lined up and execute? Can we stop the run? I think all the questions that we had coming in, you know, we don’t get to play against that kind of offense. So, it’s tough to prepare for.”

Kirby Smart on Kelee Ringo’s performance

“Yeah, he’s resilient. He’s a competitor, you know? He texted me, I think it was Sunday morning as we were getting ready for Tennessee. He was like, ‘Can I come see you?’ I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘I want No. 11.’ I’m like, ‘Well, that’s not the game plan. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re going to do it the way we think’s best. I appreciate your energy, your enthusiasm, but we’re going to put a plan together and we’re going to ask you to execute it. And he bought into that. He practiced really hard this week. It was important to him to play well.”

Smart on Nolan Smith being on the sideline

“I didn’t hear him. I know I heard his voice talking in there but I don’t know exactly the message and what he said. There were a lot of guys who spoke up and said, ‘hey, this guy (Smith) would be out there giving his all for us. The thing we can do is come out and compete and play for him.’ Nolan is unique. Nolan plays for the University of Georgia. And every kid we’ve got plays for the University of Georgia but Nolan Smith cares dearly about this university. He would give anything. He’d probably rather play with that arm if it meant hurting him in the NFL draft. He didn’t care. He wants to win. He’s a competitor and those guys are hard to find and rare. His messaging and presence, I told him he could impact this game just getting guys to go line up faster.”

Smart on the blueprint for replacing 15 draft choices like UGA has

“Recruiting hard. Playing with physical toughness. I really don’t think it’s… I think everybody in the SEC recruits well. Everybody’s got good football players around them. Yeah, you’ve got to go sign good football players. We’ve done that but from what I hear from other people who watch us, it’s physical toughness. It’s Tuesday and Wednesday practice and I think physical toughness won out today for us because they’re a really physical team. People don’t understand that. They’re extremely physical. They run the ball between the tackles and until you take that away, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you do outside. You better be able to strike people and get off blocks.”

Kirby Smart on Jalen Carter’s presence

“I think it gave us some juice and energy. The number one thing it gave us is depth. We had two guys in that room come up with the flu this morning and I’m like, ugh. Jalen is going to have to play more snaps and he took it head on. I don’t know how many he ended up playing but he’s certainly an energy boost in terms of the confidence the other players have in him.”

Smart on Stetson Bennett’s play with all the talk coming in on Hendon Hooker

“I thought our quarterback played really good. He played within the system. He understands our system. He puts us in the right play so much. The drive before the half was just clockwork for him to eat their time and guarantee that they didn’t get a double possession because they were getting the first possession of the second half. That was critical. That middle eight that he did a phenomenal job. If anything I slowed him down because I wanted to make sure that they didn’t get a possession. But he converted that 3rd and 5 and it left us with only one play instead of two. But he knows what he’s doing. He understands it. I think he can tell you that there’s still mistakes. But when you put that much pressure on a kid and that much decision-making, you’re going to have some of that gray area sometimes.”

Smart on not wanting to let Tennessee get the ball back before the half

“Yeah, I probably didn’t do a good job there. It was one of those deals where – we were talking on the headphones the whole time. We had three timeouts so we were never worried. It’s a cat and mouse game, because he’s (Josh Heupel) over there and called a timeout. So you’ve got second down and about four or five, and I’m looking at him, and he’s like, ‘Man.’ He knows he’s helping us. I’m looking across like, ‘You gonna call a timeout because if you’re not, I might.’ He wanted the extra possession, and he ended up not doing it. When the clock was running, Stetson was ready to snap it and go convert the third down. But if we didn’t get the third down, I didn’t want them getting the ball back because they’ve been able to be explosive and score quickly.”

Kirby Smart on Ladd McConkey

“The guy just runs ’til his tongue hangs out. We have to temper him in practice. We’ve got to slow him down. He’s going to run himself to depth, and I’m like, ‘We’ve got to check his GPS, check his volume.’ I said he wasn’t able to go Wednesday or Thursday. He came out and played with great toughness. He blocks well. The guy’s a competitor, and you know, his family is the biggest Tennessee people there are. He grew up a Tennessee fan all his life, and that was a big game to him.”

Smart on if he ever recalls a game where the crowd had that big of an impact

“Notre Dame baby. You guys tell me. Notre Dame seemed like they had 12 of them. But it was electric. And you get that when you have a good defense. You get a really good crowd.”

Smart on Stetson winning big games

“Competitive excellence. Competitive toughness. he’s a winner. I mean, let’s be honest. The guys wins. The guy knows how to play the game. he understands what people are doing. He came off the field one time, we were frustrated and said, ‘Well, what coverage was it?’ He said what coverage it was, a lot of people were saying it wasn’t, go back and look, turns out he was right. He sees the game, he understands it. He’s stubborn as hell sometimes, but he’s a competitor.”

Kirby Smart on if the defense took it personally to perform against Tennessee offense

“You know, I don’t know. All the stuff that was written and said, we never utilize it or said anything. They get questioned all the time because of the guys that left. Well because they other guys left, why does that matter? They got here on their own merit. The biggest confidence question for them was Tennessee because they are explosive. They are really hard to stop on offense. There was doubt, some question marks there, but they stayed the course. They bought into this plan. Every coach, five coaches on defense would go over this exact plan every day. This is what we’re doing. This is how we’re doing it. We’re going to keep it simple. We’re going to line up fast, we’re going to strike blockers, we’re going to play people, we’re going to keep the ball in front of us, we’re not going to let them be explosive, we’re going to affect the quarterback, we’re going to buy into it, and if everybody does it – we were talking about the plan every time they came off the field. They executed the plan.”

Smart on his team’s performance at the line of scrimmage

“Very pleased. I think the line of scrimmage always dictates the outcome of games because eventually, eventually you have to be able to run the ball some. We were able to run it. I still feel they ran it well late but we controlled the run game.”

Smart on if he wanted to run the ball in the second half to chew clock or because of the weather

“The weather. It was sloppy. You saw it. Back-to-back. It’s wet. The ball is everywhere. They fumbled. They hardly ever fumble. We fumbled. It was back-to-back. It becomes who can not mess it up. It becomes a who can not mess it up. At that point, it was a different type of game. We went in the bag a little bit and they were in a tough position. It’s hard to throw in that environment.”

Kirby Smart on Brett Thorson’s 75-yard punt

“I told him he worked it like a boomerang from Australia. It was sidewinding. I kept saying get out of bounds. Get out of bounds. It was a hell, a hell of a kick by him. That was a big momentum swing.”

Smart on adjustments Georgia defense made with staff

“Sound, but I would say again what did we say we were not going to do? We were not going to give them layups. If they go for a layup, we’re fouling. We’re not giving them layups. We’re not giving them layups. We stayed away from layups. No disrespect to those other teams. They had a good plan, probably, too. If you make it hard, complicated, you can’t do it fast enough.”

Smart on impact on recruiting

“Yeah, I thought our crowd impressed the folks that were here. We’re very fortunate to have a facility here that our administration helped build. If it rains they can go inside. If they want to stay outside and celebrate in the rain with us, they can. A lot of them are going back to our facility now to spend time with us. Ultimately, this game will probably get us another good player that will probably playing against them here in two years. That’s the name of the game. You want to be a good coach, you’ve got to sign good players.”

Kirby Smart on Robert Beal

“I don’t know. That’s a great question. They told me they were taking him for X-ray, and I never heard anything else. I don’t know there.”

Smart on what impressed him the most about his team 

“Just the courage to stick with the plan. There’s a lot of folks outside doubting them. They never doubted themselves. There’s a lot of confidence in that room. These players are confident. I’m most proud of our staff, man. The staff really worked hard this week to have a good plan, to execute the plan. The players didn’t let their ego get in the way. Gameday’s here, SEC Nation’s here, everybody’s here, it’s the biggest matchup in Athens. I’m going to stick with the plan. The plan was to execute your job, play in and play out, be explosive on offense, push the pocket on rush. We did that.”

Smart on why Georgia was able to execute its plan to perfection

“I don’t know. I don’t know the other team’s plan. I know for us, it was all about getting lined up quicker than they do. In practice, we told our players, they did double the reps this week. In terms of the amount of minutes you practice in a period, in 12 minutes you usually do 24 plays. We had periods where we were getting 35, 40 plays depending on how fast they were going. They doubled up. I think that helped play a part of it. I think the success we had early in the game. When you play Tennessee, they go for the knockout blow in the first round. You’ve got to survive it. I don’t like surviving anything, we want to attack it. But with them, it’s about surviving that.”

Kirby Smart on Arian Smith’s big catch after all he’s gone through

“Man, that guy stays out there. I kept having dreams I was going to have to put him in against their 11 and let him run. He stayed after practice every day, ran a lot of comeback routes, a lot of slants, a lot of deep balls. For him to get that, so much gratification for this kid who worked so hard. He had bumps and bruises during the week and had to go in a black shirt and bounced all the way back. I really thought he was going to catch that ball late to put a dagger in there. He’s a great kid and a really good player.”

Smart on if he slept well last night

“I slept better as the week went on. I felt really good in the plan we had. I thought we had to execute it. I told my wife and kids leaving today, I said, we’ve done everything we can do. We’ve put together a great plan, our kids have bought into it. Just go execute it. I knew that our crowd would impact the game. Someone texted me and said, hey, remember Alabama-Auburn last year at Auburn. They had crowd noise galore and they had all those sacks. It goes back to, when you play on the road in the SEC, you can’t account for that point-two seconds of get-off. That changes the rush. It changed tonight. It helped our rush.”

Smart on the players not really celebrating after the win

“I hope that it’s not [they’re] ready to get downtown. I hope that’s not it. They buy into. They understand that humility is a week away. They’ve got to go to Starkville the next week, which is a tough game. I’ll be honest with you: our guys probably want to get in there to go in [the locker room] and celebrate. Half of them go and get their phones as soon as they walk in. They’re like — well, I can’t say that. They’re just like my kids. They wanted to get their phones and see what somebody said about them, so y’all say nice stuff about them tonight.”

Kirby Smart on if this was the loudest he has ever heard Sanford Stadium

“I always tell people: When you can’t hear, it’s deafening. Like, what’s more deafening than deafening? The decibel thing, I don’t understand that. No way it’s accurate. I look at as Tennessee was loud, Arkansas was loud, Notre Dame was loud. It was loud. Loud is loud. So, there’s a point where you cannot hear. I’m also proud of fans because I don’t know if our stadium is exactly built vertically for just crazy crowd noise, but they were impactful tonight.”

Smart on Javon Bullard in the defensive scheme tonight

“He is so tough. He is so physical. He’s like a little stick of dynamite. And when we recruited him, it was [the] COVID year, and there weren’t that many people recruiting. I said, ‘This guy’s tough. He loves contact. He hits people.’ And Schumann and the defensive staff — I give Schumann a lot of credit. He came up with a couple plays that he thought would disrupt them, and he kept running the same thing. Like, ‘We can’t run it again.’ He ran it again. I said, ‘We can’t run it again.’ He ran it again. I was like, jeez. But Bullard kept coming off the edge and was really impactful as a rusher, and the guys in the back end held up. So, I was really proud of those guys.

Now, look, I want to make sure — I’m super proud of our offense because I personally felt coming into that game that Tennessee’s defense was really peaking and getting better. They had played really good football, guys. They attack the ball, they do good in the red area, they’ve got a good defensive unit, and our offense came out to play.”