“If you can stomp out entitlement with leadership, then you can stay hungry. We have a saying around our place: We eat off the floor. If you’re willing to eat off the floor, it can be special.” — Kirby Smart

It has always been about players. Hell, Kirby Smart spelled it out for everyone in 2021 after Georgia routed rival Florida.

He wasn’t necessarily taking a shot at embattled Gators coach Dan Mullen after a 27-point win, he was pointing out the reality of college football program building.

There’s no magic formula, no secret sauce. Get up every morning and recruit.

“There’s no coach out there that can out-coach recruiting,” Smart said.

Translation: Players mean everything. That, of course, means recruiting is everything.

The day Smart left Alabama in December of 2015, he took out his cell phone and snapped a picture of the Alabama recruiting board. He then showed every player Georgia was recruiting, and declared this is where Alabama has you rated.

This is where we have you rated.

From Day 1, Smart knew the bar — and more important, knew how to reach and eventually surpass it. The bar: Alabama.

When Nick Saban, the greatest coach in the history of college football, shows you the process and explains the way, you soak it in and do the only thing that can beat him at his own game.

Recruit (and develop) players better than he can.

“As far as the way we organize and run the program, most of that comes from Coach Saban,” Smart said.

The one thing that matters more than anything else comes from Smart. His ability to read young people on the recruiting trail is legendary, and has been since he was landing critical recruits for Saban in his 9 years at Alabama.

Saban’s Alabama teams were never better, never more feared, than during the early 2010s when Saban and Smart (and a few other critical assistant coaches) were an unbeatable force on the recruiting trail.

Imagine having both Saban and Smart recruiting for your program right now. That’s what Alabama had – and that’s why after the their first national title in 2009, a run of unprecedented success unfolded and they were but a handful of plays from 5 straight national championships.

Alabama won the national title in back-to-back seasons in 2011-12 (the last to do so before Smart’s Georgia teams completed the double this season), could’ve won 2013 (Auburn’s legendary Kick-6 play ended the season), and lost by 7 in the 2014 Playoff semifinals to eventual national champion Ohio State. A year later, Alabama won it all again.

Over those 5 years, Saban and Smart teamed to win 62 of 69 games, and the 7 losses were by a combined 49 points.

A year later, Smart left for his alma mater Georgia — and everything changed.

Kirby Smart demanded perfection — then achieved it

It’s not like Georgia wasn’t winning before Smart arrived. Beloved former coach Mark Richt averaged nearly 10 wins a season, and in 2012, the Dawgs were a play from beating Alabama in the SEC Championship Game. Win that, and the Dawgs become the SEC champion that emasculated Notre Dame in the BCS Championship Game.

After the loss to Alabama, in a solemn locker room in the old Georgia Dome, then-Dawgs offensive coordinator Mike Bobo — Smart’s best friend from their playing years in Athens in the 1990s — sat in a folding chair in the middle of the locker room, staring into space.

He and Smart played 4 years at Georgia, and went through difficult times with their careers matching up with Steve Spurrier’s run through the SEC.

“It’s so difficult to earn this rare opportunity, and not be able to finish,” Bobo said that evening, without looking up. “I played here, I know what these guys are feeling. It’s sickening.”

Over the next 3 years, Rich’s teams went 27-11, and he was fired at the end of the 2015 regular season. Richt, like Jim Donnan before him, recruited at a high level but a combination of bad decisions, good decisions that turned bad, and just plain rotten luck, torpedoed what could’ve been so much more.

Smart arrived, and luck wasn’t part of the equation.

Georgia went from 2 players’ coaches — who were successful in their own way — to a players’ coach who demanded perfection. To a coach who walked into the facility, flashed his 4 national championship rings over the previous 9 years and declared the days of losing the SEC East Division were over.

“It’s not that difficult to do the math. He won a (national title) almost once every 2 years,” Georgia tailback Sony Michel told me in 2017. “So yeah, the buy-in was a lot easier.”

To this day, Smart credits the 2016 team that won 8 games and dealt with some ugly losses (hello, Vanderbilt), as the foundation of the program. There was talent on that team, significant talent left behind from Richt’s recruiting.

Nick Chubb, Roquan Smith, Lorenzo Carter, Isaiah Wynn, Terry Godwin, DeAndre Baker. Do I need to continue?

But they didn’t know how to win, what it took to win. What Saban drilled into a similarly talented Year 1 Alabama roster in 2007, and year later, that same team was playing in the SEC Championship Game — but lost to Florida and missed out on the BCS National Championship Game.

Smart’s 2nd team at Georgia followed the same path, only it won the SEC Championship Game and advanced to the Playoff.

By the time Georgia won a thrilling Rose Bowl national semifinal against Oklahoma, there was no denying it: Smart had transposed what he learned from Saban onto Georgia.

Only a blown coverage in overtime against Alabama in the 2017 national title game kept Smart from winning it all in Year 2 and doing what even Saban couldn’t.

But if those 2015-16 teams were the foundation of what Smart built, the 2018-2020 teams were similar to the near 5-year championship run Alabama made from 2011-2015. Everything was in reach, until it wasn’t.

The 2018 team needed to beat Alabama in the SEC Championship Game to advance to the Playoff, blew a 14-point lead in the 2nd half and lost.

The 2019 team ran into the greatest team in the modern era of college football, and lost to LSU by 27 in the SEC Championship Game, which again was a de facto Playoff quarterfinal.

The 2020 team signed Wake Forest transfer quarterback Jamie Newman, and was a favorite to reach the Playoff. Smart hired offensive coordinator and QBs coach Todd Monken to develop an offense and a position that had been problematic since the 2017 national championship game.

Then COVID happened, and Newman opted out of the season. Georgia also had USC transfer JT Daniels, who was rehabbing from a knee injury, and a former walk-on who returned from junior college exile by the name of Stetson Bennett.

By the end of the season, after Georgia played 3 quarterbacks (D’Wan Mathis, Bennett and Daniels), the Dawgs won their last 4 games under Daniels and the thought of what could’ve been with Daniels in losses to Alabama and Florida hung over the program.

Everything was set up for 2021 — with Daniels and Monken in Year 2, and the most talented roster Smart and his staff had recruited and developed.

Only someone forgot to tell the former walk-on.

Stetson Bennett … the unlikely key to it all

There’s really no other way to say it: Smart and his offensive staff didn’t exactly nail the quarterback position since 2017. And frankly, they got lucky in 2017 with freshman Jake Fromm, who replaced injured starter Jacob Eason in Week 1 — then played smart, protected the ball and wasn’t intimated by the moment.

Over the next 2 seasons, the position — and how it was managed — was the only flaw in the program. It was crippling to a team that had an answer everywhere else.

Smart and former OC Jim Chaney were too beholden to Fromm, and in 2018 never found a way to take advantage of elite recruit Justin Fields’ immense talents before he left for Ohio State a year later. Fromm hit his ceiling in 2018, and didn’t have enough for LSU in 2019.

Then Monken arrived in 2020, and before long, the quarterback position was in disarray again. Only this time, it was the best thing that ever happened.

This time, the confusion birthed Stetson Bennett.

“We tried to keep him off the field since the day he got here,” Smart said.

In reality, Bennett was the glue Smart had been searching for since 2016. Georgia’s talent had always been there, from the first 2 seasons of building with Richt’s roster, to the next 3 years where Smart signed recruiting classes ranked No. 1, No. 2 and No. 1 in the nation in the 247Sports composite.

The core of the back-to-back national champions, of the devastating defenses of the past 2 seasons, were recruited from 2018-2020. The list of elite college football players from those classes is utterly ridiculous:

Travon Walker, Jordan Davis, Devonte Wyatt, Quay Walker and Lewis Cine were selected in the 1st round of last year’s NFL Draft, and Nakobe Dean and Channing Tindall were picked in the 3rd. Tyson Campbell was the 33rd overall pick (1st pick of the 2nd round) in the 2021 draft.

Jalen Carter and Kelee Ringo are projected 1st-round picks in the 2023 NFL Draft, and if Nolan Smith isn’t selected in the 1st round, it will be because of concerns about his pectoral injury. Nazir Stackhouse has a 2nd-round grade.

That’s 12 defensive players from 3 recruiting classes all going in the first 100 picks of their respective NFL Drafts.

All they needed was a quarterback who could deliver the ball to an impressive group of offensive skill players, behind an impressive group of offensive linemen. As crazy as it sounds, Smart and his staff nailed every single position on both sides of the ball in those 3 classes — except quarterback.

Since Bennett returned to Georgia from junior college in 2018, Georgia signed 2 high school 5-star quarterbacks (Fields, Brock Vandagriff) and 1 transfer 5-star (Daniels). It also signed 3 high school 4-star quarterbacks (Carson Beck, Gunner Stockton, Mathis), and a transfer (Newman).

None could keep Bennett off the field.

Georgia’s secret sauce? Never quit hunting

Bennett started 31 games in 3 seasons at Georgia, and after 2 rough games against Alabama and Florida in 2020, was nearly flawless the rest of his career.

He was 29-3 as a starter and provided exactly what the Georgia offense needed in 2021: stability, ball control and ball security.

A year later, that same safe, mange the game and don’t screw it up mentality morphed into Big Game Stetson. The big games arrived, and Bennett crushed them.

Against Oregon, Tennessee, LSU, Ohio State and TCU, Bennett accounted for 20 touchdowns (5 rush) and 1,639 yards (34 rush).

The transformation of the past 2 seasons also occurred off the field. Smart gave Monken more control of the offense and managing Bennett, and added longtime friend and former Power 5 coach Will Muschamp to the staff.

A year later, Bobo joined the staff as an offensive analyst — and gave Smart his 2 closest friends in the coaching fraternity on staff.

Both additions, a source close to the staff says, allowed Smart to finally avoid “staff meetings of like minds.”

They also improved the product on the field. Muschamp has been critical to the development of the defense the past 2 years, and Bobo worked almost exclusively with Bennett.

“Every coach needs someone who can push back,” the source said. “No one wants a bunch of yes men in that staff meeting. There’s no growth there.”

There’s a reason Georgia lost 32 percent of its scholarship players (15 to the NFL Draft, 14 to the transfer portal) after the 2021 national title and got 1 game better (14-1 in 2021; 15-0 in 2022).

They’ll lose more key players this offseason to the NFL Draft, including Bennett, and maybe just as many to the portal. But that run of recruiting classes from 2018-2020 was backed up by the 3rd, 3rd and 2nd-ranked classes from 2021-23.

There are elite blue-chip players waiting to get on the field, and continue the dominance of the defense. Guys like DE/OLBs Mykel Williams and Marvin Jones Jr., and LBs Xavian Sorey Jr., and Jalon Walker.

The offense is full of skill players in need of one thing: the glue at the quarterback position.

This time it’s Carson Beck, a redshirt junior who will have waited 3 years for his chance to play. He’s more physically gifted than Bennett, and he’s motivated.

He also won a state championship at the state of Florida’s highest classification and was yet another blue-chip player who chose Georgia over Alabama.

“We’ll have a lot of guys coming back, and we’ll lose some really talented guys and probably lose some juniors,” Smart said. “But the disease that creeps into your program is called entitlement.”

That disease has bitten so many teams over the years trying to repeat as champions. The past 2 teams to win back-to-back titles and try for a 3rd, however, had the unthinkable happen in Year 3 to prevent them from pulling off a 3-peat.

Nebraska won it all in 1994-95, and in 1996, it took a gutsy 4th-down call from Texas to win the inaugural Big 12 Championship Game and prevent Nebraska from playing in the BCS National Championship Game. Then there was the Kick-6 in 2013 that ended Alabama’s hopes.

You better believe Smart will not only remind his players of the past 2 programs that tried — and then explain he has firsthand knowledge of the last to try it.

It will be 10 years since Alabama tried to 3-peat, when most of the Georgia roster in 2023 was still in elementary school. But one thing transcends time.

“If you can stomp out entitlement with leadership, then you can stay hungry,” Smart said. “We have a saying around our place: We eat off the floor. If you’re willing to eat off the floor, it can be special.”

There’s no magic formula or special sauce — or even contrived sayings.

For 7 years, this ride has been all about players. Recruiting, developing and motivating.

It has never changed from Day 1.