When the going gets tough, Georgia gets going
STARKVILLE, Miss. — When the going gets tough, the tough get going. That’s what Georgia Football showed on Saturday night in a 45-19 win over Mississippi State. The Bulldogs turned the ball over twice Saturday night. They allowed a special teams touchdown and had a penalty on special teams that gave Mississippi State a first down on fourth down. Things were far from perfect. Still, Georgia won by 26 points on the road in a tough Davis Wade Stadium environment. That goes to show how well the No. 1 team in the country responds in the face of adversity.
“I don’t know that. I don’t know the answer to why. I do know that they have a unique connection for each other, a love for each other, an appreciation of things getting tough,” Smart said on Saturday night in his postgame press conference when asked why he believes it is that his team has the ability to respond and turn on the jets in a heartbeat. “We anticipated things being tough here so how do you anticipate things being tough? You take your DNA traits and you say they travel. They’re going with us and we’re going to use them when we need them. Because if you just lift a 50-pound bar all your life, you’re never going to get stronger, right? You’ve got to lift heavy weight. We lifted some heavy weight tonight in terms of our DNA, our composure, our resiliency, our toughness, and we were ready to use them because we practice them all year and it’s like, ‘Okay, here’s our opportunity guys. What do we want to do with it?'”
“And I don’t think you can go into the game, ‘Oh no. We’re on the road. We’re coming off the Tennessee game.’ Don’t nobody care. Nobody cares,” he continued. “The only thing we care about is how we go practice and how we go play. And right now, our kids are buying into that. They’re buying into practice matters, coach. Walkthrough matters and I appreciate our kids and how tough they are.”
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What Smart said goes back to what he’s said a thousand times before and what players have preached a million more times: Georgia makes life harder in practice so that the games are easier. When the fall comes around, the Bulldogs have been in tough situations before back in the winter, spring and summer, so they are prepared. It’s nothing new to them to be faced with adversity. Maybe it hasn’t happened a ton in games – at least on the scoreboard – because they are more talented than the majority of their opponents, but they’ve had to overcome difficult situations before and they know they’ll do it again.
Georgia clinched its spot in the SEC Championship with the win over Mississippi State on Saturday night and knows who it’ll face in Atlanta too (LSU). However, Smart made clear that the emphasis is not on starting to prepare for the conference title game and instead on the final two games of the regular season. The Bulldogs are back on the road next Saturday as they travel to Lexington to take on Kentucky. Kickoff time against the Wildcats is set for 3:30 p.m. ET on CBS.
