Kirby Smart sends a message to Georgia’s upperclassmen
With so much talent on the Athens practice fields, the Bulldogs have plenty of starting opportunities.
Competition. It’s the foundation of successful teams. Great players are pushing other great players to improve or be sidelined. Georgia excels at this more than any other college football team.
Georgia is in an interesting situation as we approach 2024. “Returning starters” used to be a prediction of team success, but in the age of the Transfer Portal, it’s becoming increasingly unusual to find a team with a large number of returning starters. The Bulldogs have exactly that. They’re losing only three starters on both sides of the ball.
Having all of that talent return had to be fantastic, right? Head coach Kirby Smart has a different perspective. Just because you’ve begun before does not guarantee that your employment will be safe this season.
“I ask you; because you’ve taken snaps, does that make you better than other people?” Smart asked earlier this week.
Certainly, competition will always exist at Georgia. The Bulldogs recently added another No. 1 overall recruiting class, this time with five-star recruits who will not sit back and let veterans take all of the plays.
“I certainly value experiences, especially in our league,” continued Smart. “But you can go backward. And you have to be careful with guys that are older because if you’re not careful, they go backward and the younger guy beats them out. It hasn’t been a year that we were here that a younger player hasn’t surpassed an older player, because they were hungrier, and they were more driven and more motivated.”
Now, two things can be true at the same time. Smart is almost certainly using the media here to send a message to his upperclassmen, something he does often, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t mean every word of it. When Jamon Dumas-Johnson, a guy with two seasons of starting at linebacker for Georgia under his belt, got hurt last season, freshman linebacker CJ Allen stepped in and never relinquished his role. Malaki Starks stepped on campus at as a freshman and beat out multiple blue-chip recruits to start in his first college game.
With so many players returning, we have a pretty good feel of what Georgia’s two-deep will look like week one against Clemson, but don’t be shocked if there are a couple of surprises from younger players.
