UGA Football Coach Kirby Smart Delivers “Fire, Passion, Energy” Speech at 2025 Media Days
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ATLANTA - UGA Football coach Kirby Smart and the Georgia Bulldogs take center stage at 2025 SEC Media Days at the College Football Hall Of Fame in Atlanta.
Opening Statement: Our team is going to be comprised of 54 percent first and second-year players. Very big change for us. I thought last year was probably one of the most veteran teams I've been a part of. You guys know the COVID class has kind of aged out, so we had multiple players that were in their fifth and sixth year last year, especially across the offensive and defensive lines. We had a tremendous group that all went out kind of at the same time, aged out at the same time, and so we're going to be really young, especially on the offensive and defensive lines.
But 54 percent of our players are coming into their first or second year. What do you get with that? You get youthful exuberance. We've had practices that have been spirited. We had a
great spring practice that we talked about the words fire, passion and energy. I think the biggest thing that separates college football teams today is complacency among players versus fire, passion and energy among players. So we've tried to highlight those traits as much as possible with our players. Our players need to bring juice and energy each and every day. If they don't, they'll be confronted by the players that do. And if the players continue to do that, we'll have a successful season and a successful football team.
In a day and age that, I think Sankey referenced it yesterday, times are changing. College athletics and college football is not broken. He used the word strained. I would say that it's in a time of change and influx, that you have to navigate better than your opponent. You have to navigate better than your competitor, whether that's conference to conference or within your own conference. We continue to find ways to do that at the University of Georgia.
We sell relationships over transactions. We think the relationship still wins out because the relationship allows you to push people and demand excellence, and we're going to continue to do that at Georgia. We don't believe in just being transactional because when you're transactional, you cannot accomplish whatever your ultimate goal is, whatever your greatest reach is. Whatever the ceiling is for every player and every team we have, you don't reach that without relationships. So we're going to try to win 24-hour increments each and every day to make sure we still attain that.
Q. You've continually been outspoken about walk-ons and their intrinsic value to your program. What is your message to the players that may not have those same opportunities that your previous walk-ons had with the new roster limits?
KIRBY SMART: Well, that's a great first question because I don't want to jump on a soapbox and tell you how I really, really, really feel. Opportunities are being lost all across college athletics. Unfortunately, that's part of it. I can't really give a message to the next walk-on because I
don't know that there's going to be an opportunity for that walk-on. I think find value in what people want. We still really preach fire, passion and energy, so we want kids who love the game. We found it's not how fast you run the 40 or how talented you are, it's how fast you run the 40th 40 and how passionate you are in the third and fourth quarter when you're tired.
Sometimes those guys have more intrinsic value for your team than maybe a guy who is a scholarship player but is disinterested because he's not playing. So a lot of those stories have been lost. But I think you can reward those by going out and finding kids to fit in your 105. Doesn't matter whether you call them a walk-on or just a scholarship player that may not get as much NIL that play with fire, passion and energy. I'm looking forward to continuing that long kind of history we have of doing that by finding the right kind of players to come play at Georgia who love the university, who want to get a degree from there, and who want to be great football players.
Q. You beat Texas twice last year; now you get them at home. Do you have any special secret to beating Sark, and any insights from your days at Alabama that work well toward that end?
KIRBY SMART: No. I think if you're going to beat a good football team, you've got to be a sound football team yourself. I didn't overlap with Sark that I remember at Alabama, so we weren't there at the same time. Tremendous respect for him and his program, the job they do. To beat good teams, you've got to be a good team. We had a good football team last year. So did they. It's not about us as coaches. It's really about the players and what you believe in. We got a lot of really good football teams to play next year besides just Texas, so we're preparing for all of them.
Q. Coach, I know during the off-season you've talked about building depth. You were at Alabama nine years. You and Coach Saban built a lot of depth in the program. You've done that during the majority of your 10 years at Georgia. How have you changed within your organization to try to speed up somebody's development when you get to develop depth with the impact of the transfer portal and NIL?
KIRBY SMART: Yeah, first of all, you don't speed up development. That's a misnomer. If you want to speed up development, then you're probably looking for shortcuts that don't exist. You want to develop somebody, it takes time. It takes reps. We can't replicate reps faster. We can't speed up a guy's transition. The transition it takes to become a good football player is different for every kid, and I've been fortunate for the last 19 years of college football to learn that and learn that it takes what it takes, and it takes time to grow those players. Now, I wish I could speed it up. I really wish I could speed it up this year. But there's no remedy or magic potion or we're going to go get this guy out of the portal or that guy out of the portal. It's all about continuity and what you're doing with each team.
You're seeing that across college football where there's beginning to be a little bit more parity, I think, and it's probably going to continue to go that way, so who does the best with what they have, which is what I enjoy about the game.
Q. Gunner's relief appearance against Texas, how did that benefit the locker room the way he came in for Carson, and how does that serve as a teaching tool for young players who may not be starting?
KIRBY SMART: Yeah, I don't know that the benefit in the locker room is as great as the other parts you just said. What does it teach a young player that's sitting in the wings that you just don't ever know when your number is going to be called. The one thing that I really appreciate about Gunner and most quarterbacks is he prepared every game as if he was the starter. People can say that and say that's coach-speak, but he actually did it. He went in, watched extra tape, and he knew that at any point in time, he could be called up to go into the game and play, and he didn't play in a normal environment where you've got a big lead, maybe you're beating an opponent; he went in against a top defense in the country in one of the biggest games of the season and performed well, for a guy that had not gotten a lot of reps with the ones. So I thought he handled that moment well,
and he taught a lot of our young players that you've got to be prepared and ready.
Q. You mentioned a little bit on character, football, personal character background and stuff, and everybody talks about the film evaluation side of things, and character, football stuff has always been important. It used to be a scholarship and cost-of-attendance check. Now we're putting real percentages money-wise revenue on these kids' heads. What are the cutting-edge things you guys are doing at Georgia to be ahead of that, be ahead of the curve in the character and personal development, bringing the right kids into your program?
KIRBY SMART: Yeah, I don't know that I would say cutting edge. We're all trying to do it better than anybody else. If I share that with you, then I'm sharing it with everybody. If we're doing anything cutting edge, I'm not sharing it today; I can assure you of that. What I do think is important or more important that you hit on is it's less about what the tape looks like, okay. For instance, if we're going to sign four corners or four DBs, there's going to be a thousand DBs that are good enough on the tape. Let's don't talk about the DBs that are above the line. The line is are they good enough to play winning football at Georgia. There's thousands. Let's just get the ones that care, the ones that are not transactional, that are relationship built. They want relationships. They want to be coached. They want to be pushed.
Yeah, they're going to get paid. No coach is going to stand up here and say they don't want players to get paid. We want them to get paid. I'm completely comfortable with that. What I want is them to get paid and that not change how they go about their business, that not change if they're sensitive to being demanded excellence of. It's so ironic to me that you meet a parent and they're like, Coach, I really want my son to play where he's pushed and demanded of and he gets coached each and every day the hard way because I honestly don't think he can make it without that. We all needed it. I needed it at 17. A 17-year-old needs to be pushed. It doesn't preclude them
from gaining monetary value. They can do both those two things. But a lot of coaches aren't willing to do that. People don't want to confront and demand anymore for fear of losing a player. I would rather go get the right player that buys into that and then I've got something special when they do
develop and get all those reps.
Q. Your '25 non-conference schedule is what it is, but going forward it's pretty robust, including 2030 you've got Georgia Tech, Clemson and Ohio State. What's the chances those games hold and then the scheduling philosophy you guys mapped out continues?
KIRBY SMART: Really no clue what the chances are. It's one of those things that I can only speculate on. I love big out-of-conference games. I love opportunities to play teams on a big stage, to open with big games. Everybody talks about it. I think that's where we're headed. To have that kind of schedule where you get to play out of conference and you play other -- the A4s. I love those kind
of games because our kids get up for them. I think the bigger decision is how many teams are going to be in the playoff, how we go about selecting those playoffs. You're going to motivate more teams to play schedules like that with a fix in the way we go about selecting the
teams.
Q. You keep talking about how fire, passion and energy are huge pillars of the Georgia football program, actually added pillars to the foundation. Can you name a few specific players that have exhibited it thus far, and why add it in this particular off-season?
KIRBY SMART: Well, it's hard for me to pick one or two players. I actually want them to compete to separate themselves as guys that have fire, passion and energy. We've picked a few. I don't really choose to share them publicly today because that could change as soon as tomorrow, who's working out the hardest, who's leading and who's pushing. Why is it important to identify it now? Because the culture in college football is slowly changing. You've got to remember I was part of a nine-year program and a nine-year run that was one of the greatest ever in college football and now I'm at a place that's doing it right and competing at a really high level. I've seen what it looks like to have fire, passion and energy, and I've seen guys that were really hungry, and I go back to Dont'a Hightower or Rolando McClain or Julio Jones or Trent Richardson or Mark Ingram, all the way to
Roquan Smith to Nolan Smith to Jordan Davis to George Pickens to Jake Fromm to guys that played in our program, D'Andre Swift. You know what they had? They had a love
for the game and fire, passion and energy.
That's not the same as it used to be. You can say what you want, but there's people more in college football today, especially in the SEC, that are comfortable with where they are. This is a pretty good life. I'm earning 200K a year. I'm very comfortable. You don't reach your goals being comfortable. You don't attain great success -- none of those people I mentioned before were ever comfortable.
They were aiming at something. They had a goal. They wanted to go achieve it. What you see now is where's the drive and energy and enthusiasm. Well, we want people that have it. We're going to seek it. We're going to try to go find it. If we can just do that 1 percent better than everybody else, it gives us an opportunity to be ahead.
Q. Just curious, Texas has got a lot of attention during this season. You talked about how underclassmen heavy your program is. Do you sense a level of eagerness from the underclassmen to prove hey we can be just as good as the Georgia teams of the fact
and quite frankly we beat Texas twice last year?
KIRBY SMART: Yeah, a lot of those kids didn't. They weren't the guys on the field. But yeah, I do sense in our practices, in our workouts and the things we've been able to be a part of in the spring, there is a youthful exuberance. That can be positive and negative. I can sit up here last year and tell you how experienced we were. We had all these guys coming back and they played a lot of football. But are they motivated and are they really wanting to be great as opposed to sometimes when it's new there's a lot more excitement. It's their first time getting a chance to
start. It's their first time being a major player in the rotation.
There's good and bad about both. We've got to manage that. We've got to be patient with them and we've got to get them better.
Q. How much have your practices changed or how much do you plan to modify them from the time of the back-to-back titles and Bloody Tuesdays now with longer seasons and now roster limitations in effect?
KIRBY SMART: Well, demands on how limited our roster is because we're not all operating off of 105 right now. We have the ability because of the settlement to have some guys that were grandfathered in. We will make changes and adaptations to how we do things based on our numbers, but right now I don't know what those numbers are going to look like for fall camp and how many people we're going to bring in. The season ultimately we may have similar numbers to what we've had in past years. Eventually that's going to go down to 105 and you're going to have to change with each and every year, and I think you evolve as a coach. We've got to find more creative ways to get reps and grow players, and we all study NFL teams, the way they go about it. I just don't know if that's a perfect mirror because the kids we're trying to develop need more reps than an NFL player. First thing a general manager tells us when they come see us is don't come to our league to develop. We can't develop you. We don't have the practices. If you actually want to get better at football where you can stay longer in the NFL, you have to go through the college regimen to grow and get better. They don't need the practices that we need.
Q. You mentioned a young secondary a couple minutes ago. One position I wanted to ask you about
was the strong safety. You have some young talented freshmen but you also have some familiar names on the roster. Give us some insight on how the position is heading into fall camp?
KIRBY SMART: Yeah, we've got great competition there. KJ Bolden played a lot of snaps last year. He's coming back. We need him to be a leader. We need him to help set the tone for how to go about things. We've got some older players there that are going to be in competition, and
we've got a couple transfers in.
We do things a lot of times defensively by committee. We play a lot of players. I think we had third or fourth most players over 100 snaps. So if you come to Georgia, you expect to play, we want to give you an opportunity to play, so we get a lot of those guys reps and grow them and we'll see where we are in fall camp at that position.
Q. The last time that Alabama played Georgia in Athens you were a defensive coordinator for the
Crimson Tide. What are your thoughts on that game? Last year's game was great. What are your thoughts on hosting Alabama this season?
KIRBY SMART: It's a great atmosphere, just like we went into last year to play them, a night game on the road. They'll come to our place and play. A tremendous atmosphere. I know a lot of people from Tuscaloosa are coming over to the game. Athens, the city of, loves it. We bring a great environment.
It's what college football is about. This game is about playing great match-ups like that. It's what the fan bases want. It's what the nation wants. It's what college football needs. It's what college football and the SEC is about. Georgia and Alabama at home, at our place, I wish it could happen more often. Seems like we've played over there three or four times since they've come to see us and play. So it's a great opportunity, and I look forward to it.