Kirby Smart happy to say goodbye to ‘talking season,’ see which players will win jobs
By Keith Farner
Published:
Georgia coach Kirby Smart is not a fan of “talking season,” so when preseason practice begins in earnest, he loves it. Even though he didn’t love it as a player, when two-a-day practices were the norm.
“Everybody talking about the players, the season, this and that,” he said on WSB’s Bulldog Gameday, “we want to see them get out there and compete. A lot of our guys that don’t get talked about that are excited about winning jobs, so let’s get on the field and see who wins them.”
Smart added that expectations talked about during the summer won’t have a bearing on any outcome this fall, so the coach said the program largely doesn’t talk about what others think about the Bulldogs.
“The only thing that’s going to effect the outcome of the game is what we do with our actions,” he said. “So we focus on that, we focus on the work, and it takes what it takes and that’s kind of been our mantra. So we’ve got to go do the right things in every facet to get the marginal gains we need.”
Smart said Georgia is deeper at some positions and not as deep at others, but overall, it is similar to previous teams he’s coached.
“It’s not going to boil down to the depth, but the buy-in of each guy on the team,” he said.
Georgia kicks off the season at Vanderbilt on Aug. 31.
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
