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Another Kirby Power Move: This Time Striking Saban, Alabama

February 24, 2020
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ATHENS - If you were wondering about if Kirby Smart is worried or concerned about poking the bear that is Alabama wonder no more. 

He don’t care. I’m not sure Kirby has ever cared. 

Kirby is about Kirby. Kirby is about UGA. If Nick Saban and Alabama get in the way… well that’s too bad. That can be handled on the field. In fact, it will be handled on the field this fall - another colossal matchup between the two college football powers in a matter of four years. 

You are welcome CBS and college football.

Georgia has lost the previous two times Kirby has been coach of the Dawgs. That’s not going to continue forever. Moves like this prove it. (Note to Alabama honk reading this: Thinking that you are going to beat Georgia forever because you’ve beaten them twice in the final moments of the last two games is as naive as thinking that your program’s power is going to last forever - all good things come to an end at some stage. There will be an end - we just can’t know when that end will get here.)

Still, Kirby’s power move today hurt Alabama in two ways. First, Scott Cochran, who has a reputation in the strength and conditioning world that’s about as good as it gets, is no longer at Alabama. Second, UGA is strengthened by the move - pun intended - because he’s not at Bama any more, and he is in Athens. 

What helps Georgia isn’t good for Alabama and vice versa. This is a zero sum game. It is that simple. 

Georgia folks know that this sort of power move wouldn’t have been made in the past. One reason or another would have gotten in the way of the head coach at Georgia doing this sort of land grab. 

But in the last half decade Georgia and its athletic department finally decided to go full-bore and try to win in a big way. OK with being OK isn’t OK any more, and the results speak for themselves. Georgia has won the SEC East three years running, the SEC in 2017, the Rose Bowl in 2017 and the Sugar Bowl in 2019. The program has finished in the top ten three years in a row.

The last time that happened was from 2002 to 2005, and that served as the best run in Athens since the early 1980s.

How does Cochran add to the program, and make the Dawgs even better? That remains to be seen. He will likely take over an on-field position that’s not on defense. Frankly, what Cochran does or does not do with the program is not the point here.

Here’s the point: Sam Pittman took the Arkansas head coach spot, and was replaced within a few weeks by a dismissed head coach in the SEC - former Ole Miss coach Matt Luke. Cochran, who has been seen in T Town as just as important as any long-serving assistant not named Kirby Smart, left Bama to come to Georgia. Jamie Newman, the most-sought-after grad transfer on the market picked UGA. 

Those things are not accomplished by accident. This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Kirby and UGA made those things happen. Frankly, Kirby’s UGA made those things happen. 

All of that tied together has made UGA more dangerous today than it was yesterday, and that’s really saying something. 

That should is the part that should cause concern for those in britches that aren’t silver.

 
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