Georgia Coach Kirby Smart Has High Expectations For Top Young Linebacker
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ATHENS - If there’s one thing you can always expect from the Georgia Bulldogs, it’s that Kirby Smart and Glenn Schumann will have one of the best inside linebacker rooms in college football.
It won’t be easy to replace 2024 Butkus Award winner Jalon Walker and experienced veteran Smael Mondon, but Glenn Schumann still has an outstanding group leading the way in 2025.
The two expected starters are third-year players CJ Allen and Raylen Wilson but there’s plenty of talent right behind those two on the depth chart.
One of those linebacker is rising sophomore, Chris Cole. The former five-star prospect from Virginia played in all 14 games last season making 16 tackles, two TFLs and two fumble recoveries. The lean, athletic linebacker brings a lengthy 6-foot-3 225-pound frame with strong cover skills and the ability to make a secure tackle in the open field. He can run, he can hit, and flashed a lot of promise when he found his way onto the field last fall.
He may not start right away next fall, but you can expect to see Cole on the field plenty during his second season. Expectations are high, and Kirby Smart had a lot to say about his young defender last season.
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“Number one, he has tremendous pride in performance, and we rank that as one of the number one qualities”, Smart said about Cole. “A lot of people rank size, speed, height, weight and stars. He is self-aware and has great pride in performance, and that is a number one trait of a winner, of a good athlete, of guys that play as freshmen. He has size, he can run, but he's really intelligent as well as very conscientious. We've been very impressed with him, the way he's kind of grown up and gotten better. But he's still not there. It's like Raylen (Wilson) and CJ (Allen) last year. They weren't ready for what they had to go do, but they had to go play, and we need him to keep getting better and we need Justin to come along, too.”
Of course, Cole isn’t the only young linebacker looking to make a big impact next fall. Justin Williams, another forver five-star prospect from the 2024 class, won’t be riding the bench very long. He didn’t make the same type of impact that Cole did last year, but he’s another defender the staff is extremely high on.
“Chris Cole and Justin Williams are going to be really good players”, Smart said last year. “They're bright spots out there at practice each day. Justin is one of the hardest working, most positive kids I've ever been around. He and Chris are both getting better faster. All those guys, they've got a great tight-knit group."