UGA Football Coach Kirby Smart Gives Update on Mykel Williams
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ATHENS - Kirby Smart and the UGA Football team have plenty of potential All-Americans on defense heading into the 2023 season.
One of them, is defensive lineman, Mykel Williams.
The big 6-foot-5 265-pounder out of Columbus, Georgia is coming off an incredibly impressive freshman season where he started in two games but played better and better towards the end of the year. He recorded 28 total tackles, 6.5 TFLs, and 4.5 sacks. One sack came against Ohio State, and another came in Georgia’s national championship win over TCU.
He came to Athens as a 5-star prospect, and he’s already started to live up to the hype. He’s long, athletic, and knows how to naturally find himself in the backfield. Of course, he’s only scratching the surface of his potential.
While he did miss a good bit of spring practice earlier this year, Williams’ successful foot surgery has helped him come back and hopefully be close to 100% before next Saturday. Smart spoke about Williams’ during a press conference earlier this week.
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On Mykel Williams’ development over the offseason…
“Number one, he’s an extremely hard worker, but he’s not had extra work in the spring and fall because he wasn’t able to go. I guess it was a couple days in the spring, I don’t know how many practices he got in the spring before we made the decision to go ahead and have his surgery done. Once he had that, he was in the healing stages. He wasn’t able to start ramping up until about mid-July. It’s still a conditioning process for him. He has really good toughness, he has really good effort, I think the biggest thing for him right now is, can he play enough snaps, stamina-wise, without the training that some of our guys would have had over the summer? So we’re trying to increase his ability to play more snaps, because we certainly need him to play as many as he can."
Smart mentioned recently that the defensive line is not as deep as he’d like it to be, so getting Williams back is critical. He’s one of the most talented defenders on the roster and has the world in front of him. Once he’s fully healthy, look for Williams to make an immediate impact this season.
"We're not as deep as we've been” Smart said about the defensive line. “We don't have the depth that we probably have had. Maybe that's a luxury compared to other people - I don't know. I think we've got to get deeper at that position, and the only way to get deeper at the position - you can't get anybody at this point. There's nobody coming out from waivers. What you're trying to do is grow the younger players and get your older players to play at a higher level and even be able to play more snaps. Without the same depth we had last year, we're going to have to be in better shape and we've got to get the freshmen ready to play."
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