With Mel Tucker now the head coach at Colorado, Georgia will be missing its defensive coordinator in the Sugar Bowl against Texas. When Kirby Smart met with the media Monday, he was asked how calling the defense will work in New Orleans without Tucker.

“I think it affects preparation more than the actual game,” Smart said at his Monday press conference. “Obviously (Tucker and the UGA analysts who joined his CU staff) helped a lot in preparation. I think the biggest adjustment will be Mel called it and Mel’s not here. So we’ve got guys with experience calling it, whether it’s a spring game or my 12 years or whatever it is experience calling it, so we’ve got a lot of experience and value there.

“We build a call sheet that Mel uses as a team defensive unit. He’s able to pull from that in a game. We make adjustments together during the game, so that’s not something that just one person does. And it wasn’t that way at Alabama when I was there. It was a team effort and it’ll continue to be that.”

Smart, Alabama’s defensive coordinator for eight seasons (2008-15), indicated his biggest concern is with the secondary, the position group he coached at UA before becoming defensive coordinator.

“So I think the biggest thing is making sure that the defensive backs get the attention they need because there’s certainly a lot of defensive backs on the field,” Smart said. “You got four, five, six guys on the field at a time. So you’ve got to make sure you’ve got enough sets of eyes back there.”

Defensive back Eric Stokes already notices a difference in practice with Smart being more hands on.

“It is more intense, because it is the head coach so he demands more from you,” Stokes told reporters. “Everything that we have done with him so far has been real intense. We always had Coach [Glenn] Schumann and Coach [Dan] Lanning there so it won’t be too different. Nothing really has changed, it’s just Coach Tucker isn’t here. Coach Tucker meant a lot to me though. He is the one that recruited me. Without him, I wouldn’t even be here. He played a big part in who I am.”

Andrew Olson

Andrew writes about sports to fund his love of live music and collection of concert posters. He strongly endorses the Hall of Fame campaigns of Fred Taylor and Andruw Jones.