What Kirby Smart said about Florida following loss to Gators
Kirby Smart had his three-game winning streak over Florida snapped on Saturday afternoon as Dan Mullen’s Gators knocked off UGA 44-28 in Jacksonville. Smart is now 3-2 UF, with the two losses bookending his five games as a head coach in the series (2016, 2020).
Here are some of the highlights from Smart’s postgame press conference where he discussed the Gators.
Opening statement: “I’ll open it with give Dan (Mullen) and his staff credit, give Florida credit. I’ll always open with a game like that to give them credit for having a good plan offensively and defensively. I thought they did a good job trying to make us one-dimensional in terms of the different defenses they played and then, offensively, with a lot of eye candy and motions that obviously we didn’t handle well.
When asked about the impact of injuries: “It is what it is. Florida beat us. Florida out-executed us. They did a really good job. I’m not making it about injuries, I’m not making it about anything. I’m making it about they beat us.”
On the late first-half sequence, Florida widening its lead: “I wanted to be aggressive on offense and try to go score because we needed a score certainly at the point we were in. We weren’t able to do that. I’m counting on who I think is the best punter in America to take care of me and hit a bomb down there and he didn’t hit a bomb. Give them credit. They went down there and scored pretty quick with their offense.”
On UGA’s coverage of Kadarius Toney: “There were several plays where worked really hard on Kadarius Toney over the middle. He does an elite job of double moving and faking in, faking out, moving. He’s really quick where we have to put a linebacker or a DB on him the way they match him up and sometimes we covered him and sometimes we didn’t. When we didn’t, it was huge. I think we had a chance to stop them and get the ball back and Mark Webb had Kadarius Toney again and he beat him. I don’t know if it was a 3rd and 10. It was a big play for them and it just seemed like that happen so many times. I give Florida credit for that. Those weren’t busts, we got beat. We’ve got to do a better job of helping our players get in a position where they don’t get beat defensively. We can’t give up explosives like that. That’s the bottom line.”
