Kirby Smart and his Georgia Bulldogs run the SEC.
Alabama fans hate to hear it. LSU fans would like to dispute it. Texas would like us to just wait awhile. But since Kirby Smart first reached the national title game in 2018, his program has made the College Football Playoff four times in eight years and won two national championships.
Georgia head coach Kirby Smart and players celebrate after defeating the Texas Longhorns 22-19 in overtime of the 2024 SEC Championship. (Photo by Todd Kirkland/Getty Images)
The only SEC coach to put together a better run than that is Nick Saban, and he doesn’t coach anymore. When people were touting Kalen DeBoer’s coaching record before arriving as the successor to Saban at Alabama (104-12), many seemed to forget Smart had been winning from the moment he arrived to coach one of the most storied programs in the deepest league in the sport.
Consider this: Smart is 105-19 as a head coach, 53-5 over the past five years, and had already won the same number of national titles as all 11 coaches combined heading into last year’s College Football Playoff. The only coach keeping pace with Smart is Dabo Swinney, whose Clemson program is the closest thing to an SEC team outside the league.
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Smart is the best this league has to offer, and all roads run through Athens, Georgia. The defending SEC champions haven’t lost a game at home in six years, when South Carolina coach Will Muschamps made off with part of the hedges between his teeth on the way back to Columbia. That was so long ago that Muschamp has been on staff at Georgia for five years.
The way that Smart has reestablished Georgia as one of the most dominant programs in the country is by using the strategy everyone else will be forced to employ in this new era of roster caps, revenue sharing and annual turnover: Recruit the best and play everyone.
Georgia does not produce Heisman winners — the Bulldogs have only two in their rich football history (Frank Sinkwich and Herschel Walker). The program does not produce 1,000-yard receivers — just one all-time (Terrence Edwards)— and it hasn’t produced a 1,000-yard rusher since 2019 (D’Andre Swift). Yet Georgia puts trophies in the cabinet and first-round picks into the NFL Draft, totaling 11 since 2021.
Despite having a 2025 roster that is mostly made up of underclassmen, 54% according to Smart, Georgia expects to defend its SEC title and return to the CFP because most of those players, many of whom are four and five-star recruits, played significant football in 2024 and will be asked to play significant snaps again this season as young players.
Nate Frazier #3 of the Georgia Bulldogs runs with the ball during the University of Georgia Spring Game. (Photo by Steve Limentani/ISI Photos/Getty Images)
“We play a lot of players,” Smart said this week at SEC Media Days. “I think we had the 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.”
Smart learned that philosophy from Saban, who, in his last year as head coach at Alabama, started a true freshman at safety: Caleb Downs. Downs led the 2023 Crimson Tide in tackles and broke a 40-year record for tackles in a season by a freshman with 107. When Saban retired, Downs transferred to Ohio State and was one of the top defenders in the country, staring for the defending national champions.
It’s not just identifying talent that makes Smart so good in this day and age. There are 30-plus five-star prospects coming out of high school every year, and not all of them go to Georgia. It’s Smart’s ability to identify the five to seven that fit his program’s needs and the program culture.
“You can say what you want, but there are more people in college football today, especially in the SEC, that are comfortable with where they are,” Smart said. “This is a pretty good life. I’m earning 200K a year. I’m very comfortable. But you don’t reach your goals being comfortable.”
The rest of the SEC is going to have to take notes and follow Smart’s path by paying players not just with money, but with the privilege of playing early and often. Perhaps they won’t create the kind of stats that lead to media members yelling their names on a regular basis, but they will develop into NFL-caliber players who make it to their second NFL contract, and they will play for championships. Nothing in college football is assured. Nothing in college football is without risk.
Smart has coached through the creation of the transfer portal, the decision to allow players to play immediately after transferring within the FBS, the advent of NIL, and now, the beginning of revenue-sharing with players. None of this has stopped him or Georgia from doing what it must do to maintain its presence atop the deepest league in football. And yes, Kirby Smart is just fine with that.
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast “The Number One College Football Show.” Follow him at @RJ_Young.
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