Kirby Smart still holds plenty of reverence for his former boss.

Georgia has won back-to-back national championships, the first program to repeat as champs since Alabama in 2011 and 2012. Smart was on those Crimson Tide staffs, the right-hand man helping to construct Nick Saban’s Death Star.

Now with the Bulldogs, Smart has built his own program in such a way that it’s a near-perfect facsimile of the one he left in 2016. If it ain’t broke… right?

And the model certainly isn’t broken. It’s churning out national championships. Just not for the Tide at the moment. But, Saban was (still is?) the gold standard in the sport. Smart, appearing on The Paul Finebaum Show earlier this week, said as much.

“Nick’s been tremendous for our sport. Nobody has moved the college football game more than he has,” Smart said on The Paul Finebaum Show. “He has done a tremendous job of changing the game. I mean, the SEC is the premier place, primarily because he started bringing national championships there when he came to LSU. So, he’s done a lot for this game.”

As Georgia guns for a 3-peat next season, Smart says he can lean on past experiences at Alabama.

The 2013 Crimson Tide entered the year preseason No. 1. They went into the final week of the regular season unbeaten. The Kick Six sent Auburn, not Alabama, to the national title game against Florida State.

“I think you learn lessons. I mean, we won back-to-back and winning back-to-back was extremely hard then. It’s extremely hard now, and as you start to go on a journey for a third, the pressure just tends to build,” Smart told Finebaum. “We had good enough teams all those years to win it. Sometimes it takes a little luck. I mean, we got lucky against Ohio State (last year). We got lucky against Missouri in a game we didn’t play well. In the SEC, it takes a little luck and you have to have that.

“But what I learned from Nick was how to manage an organization, and he is tremendous at that. And look at what he’s done for the state of Alabama and even the city of Tuscaloosa. Nobody has impacted the state of Alabama like he has financially and giving back.”