TAMPA - UGA Football head coach Kirby Smart spoke with the media on Tuesday morning during SEC Media Days to talk about his team and the upcoming season...
On a theme for the 2026 season...
“Everybody looks for that. I think there’s become a huge deal about that. We've got things internally we're talking about emphasizing. The emphasis last year was run the ball and stop the run. We talked a lot about fire, passion and energy and how we could add that to our DNA traits. Those things are never going to change. So if you're not careful, you're just adding things and it becomes too many things to focus on. We did study the OKC Thunder in our skull sessions, and one of the themes they have and one of the things we talk about is being uncommon.”
“Being uncommon nowadays is hard to do in the world and in the culture of college football. So we're emphasizing those uncommon traits they have in terms of sharing the ball, passing, leading in all stats whether it's assists, turnovers, or defense. They were really good at it all.”
On his team’s youth...
“I'm very pleased with our group because it's just ironic to me that I remember saying last year how young we are, and I said, "We'll be young again the next year." And then guess what? We're young again. So I, you know, I think coaches come into one of these things and they say, "Well, we're young. And it's like an excuse. No, we're young, but it's not an excuse.”
“We're gonna be young every year because we still believe in a high school model. We're 27 freshmen, 27 sophomores, 26 juniors, so we're at like 30% of our roster or something is freshman, sophomore, and juniors. Then the rest is other for the fourth year and fifth year, and it's a low percentage of it. But I knew last year when I sat here and said we're really young that we'd be really young this year, too. Now, I don't think we're as young this year as we were last year, but on paper we are. It's just in different spots.”
On his roster retention...
“I choose to retain. I mean, there's coaches out there that don't choose to retain. Their players choose to leave. Not always. They get encouraged to leave. We think that our investment in our player is better than your investment in your player that I would get from you in the portal. So we just keep thinking that if we pour into our guys, that our development is gonna be better than taking a guy that's second, third, fourth year that somebody else developed.”
“Now, that's certainly not always the case. That is sometimes situational. If we're not good enough, we gotta get better at a position, and that's the probably hardest question that you deal with and you tear at your heart with is, when do I separate from a kid that I don't know if he's good enough in exchange for one that I know is basically called an upgrade, right?”
“But when you're upgrading at the expense of telling somebody they gotta go and that happens, then, maybe that's not culturally and ethically, morally right. We don't really want do that. And if we're honest with the kid, if he's been in the program three years and he hadn't played, we'll also tell him, "Hey, you got a better chance to play somewhere else."
On Georgia’s resources...
“We have no issue with resources, facilities, availability. I mean, there's never been something that I asked our administration to do from a number to go to to get a player out of the portal or get a player out of high school that they weren't willing to do. That's not the case at all. That's probably more of wrestling with that more in-house for us philosophically, how we want our roster to look, how we want our money to be spread across. High school players nowadays aren't any cheaper than portal players. So there's an expense for both, especially good players. But if we put our money where we think it's best we can put the best product we can on the field.
On last two Playoff losses...
“I don't think there's a lot of difference in our playoff games. I mean, you look at the two games that we lost in the playoffs, they were very similar to regular season games. We just came out on the wrong end of them. When you beat an Ole Miss team at home, they get a little revenge factor and quarterback plays out of his mind.”
“And then Notre Dame goes all the way to the end. We got a really young quarterback in there. We played great defensively. You look at those two games, I don't look at them as, "Oh God, there's something wrong."
“I look at it more of, how do we keep the continuity of going with what we do? Look, we're a grind you out, hard-nosed culture team. We're physical. We're better when we're playing in rhythm, when we have week after week after week and we have to rebound and play somebody. The breaks have probably affected us some.”
“Honestly, the injuries, the Gabe-Drew thing was just really, really tough, but I don't look for excuses. Those teams beat us in really tough ball games. Those games could've been week one, week five, or week 10, and the same thing could've happened. So it's not like we're looking for a complete overhaul. We're just trying to get better.”
On Drew Bobo...
“He embodies what our team is. This is a returning captain, which is rare on our team. This is one of the toughest kids on the team that played a series with a broken bone in his foot. This is a guy that pushes everybody to be better, and there's no greater position of importance on your team, maybe outside of quarterback, than the guy that's snapping it to him.
“He embodies our culture. He doesn't care who gets the credit. He's selfless. He’s born and bred a Georgia Bulldog, and he loves this place.”
