UGA Football, Kirby Smart Begin Practice for 2025 Season in Athens
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ATHENS - Kirby Smart’s UGA Football starts the 2025 season Thursday with a few questions surrounding pieces in the program.
Coming off a SEC championship-winning 2024, the Bulldogs were picked to play in the SEC Championship by the media in July, and betting markets have the Bulldogs as one of the favorites to win the College Football Playoff National Championship Game in January.
But the Bulldogs are replacing a slew of players - most notably former starting signal caller Carson Beck, who transferred to Miami for a sixth season of college football after having a season-ending injury during UGA’s overtime win over Texas in the SEC Championship Game.
Gunner Stockton is expected to be the Bulldogs’ starting quarterback for the season, which starts by hosting Marshall on August 30th. But Kirby has stated that Stockton will have to win the starting job, and that an announcement of a starting quarterback should not be expected.
“I don’t name starters,” Kirby told reporters at SEC Media Days.
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Georgia’s offense, which struggled with consistency in 2024, has restructured itself with additions from the transfer portal - particularly at receiver, which was a spot that let the Bulldogs down too often to be dependable last fall.
Kirby has said he wants to be better in the run game - defensively as well as on offense.
“You have to be able to run when everyone knows it,” he said. “And you have to be able to stop it.”
The Bulldogs never got on track with the run game in 2024.
Georgia’s defense will be young, and Kirby has said he hopes they are hungry.
“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,” he said at media days.
The Bulldogs will have to replace Jalon Walker, Malaki Starks and Mykel Williams - a trio that highlighted last season’s defense.
Kirby told reporters in July that his program is going to use the relationships they’ve built over time to make his team this best it can be.
“We sell relationships over transactions,” he said. "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.”