How Many National Titles Should Georgia Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart Win?
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ATHENS - The statement from Georgia Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart was quick and subtle.
“We’ve finished Top 7 five straight years - nobody else can say that,” he told Sirius XM earlier this month.
No one else can. There’s a little bit of nuance there. Kirby means to say that no one else can say they’ve finished top seven in the AP Poll in the last five years. These are details when you are trying to make sure you troll Alabama’s Nick Saban - or at least point out Georgia has been more consistent in that time.
Kirby let everyone know Georgia had finally hit its potential in Indianapolis’ freezing cold this January. Meanwhile, the Dawgs and Tide are favorites to win the national title once more according to FanDuel. Those two have split the last two titles and have taken up six of the available ten spots in the College Football Playoff National Title Game over the last half decade.
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“We want to continue that consistency,” Kirby said. “I want people to look back and say: ‘Golly, they had really good, consistent classes in recruiting and consistent performances on the field.”
Golly? (I prefer unfiltered Kirby).
You could already say that now. Georgia only lacked the national title that it had figured out how to avoid for decades. With that title in tow, the question now isn’t how many major bowl games the team will win, or how many AP top sevens. The question is: How many national titles can Kirby rack up with all of the recourses he has at his disposal?
The answer shouldn’t be one.
It could seem, to the untrained eye, that I am here to criticize Kirby. Nope. My point is that he is positioned not just to be the greatest coach in UGA history, but he’s got a shot at being one of the greatest coaches in SEC history. He should take advantage of what he’s built, and I expect him to.
Doing that won’t just take consistency alone. That’s step one, and it is mandatory. Step two is winning when winning is there to be had. Winning, in other words, when you are playing in the final game of the college football season. That is tougher.
We’ve entered another “new era” of our sport. We seem to do that about once a decade. This decade, however, seems tailor made for Kirby.
Now players can be recruited twice. Now college football is as much about brands and branding as anything. Now players want to play in a larger markets (and there are few markets larger than the Atlanta media market).
Kirby can take advantage of all of those things, and he will. After all, college football is littered with coaches who have won it all once. Ed Orgeron and Gene Chizik have won national titles. I rest my case. It seems hard to think that’s Kirby’s destiny.
I wonder if there is a day where Kirby says something else…
“We finished with seven national titles in my time at Georgia… no one else can say that.”
Sound crazy?
Not to me.