Kirby Smart Sends a Message to Georgia’s Upperclassmen

With so much talent on the practice fields in Athens, there are plenty of starting jobs on the line for the Bulldogs.

Competition. It’s what great teams are built on. Great players pushing other great players to be be better or get pushed aside. It’s something Georgia does as well as any team in college football

Coming into 2024, Georgia is in an interesting spot. “Returning starters” used to be a predictor of success for teams, but in the Transfer Portal era, it’s becoming rare to have a team with an abundance of their starters coming back. The Bulldogs have just that. They’re losing just three starters on both sides of the ball.

Having all of that talent coming back has to be great, right? Head coach Kirby Smart has a different take. Just because you’ve started in the past doesn’t mean you’re job is safe this season.

“I ask you; because you’ve taken snaps, does that make you better than other people?” said Smart earlier this week.

Certainly there will always be competion at Georgia. The Bulldogs just brought in another No. 1 overall recruiting class, filled with five-star recruits that won’t just sit back and let vets take all the snaps.

“I certainly value experiences, especially in our league,” continued Smart. “But you can go backward. And you have to be careful with guys that are older because if you’re not careful, they go backward and the younger guy beats them out. It hasn’t been a year that we were here that a younger player hasn’t surpassed an older player, because they were hungrier, and they were more driven and more motivated.”

Now, two things can be true at the same time. Smart is almost certainly using the media here to send a message to his upperclassmen, something he does often, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t mean every word of it. When Jamon Dumas-Johnson, a guy with two seasons of starting at linebacker for Georgia under his belt, got hurt last season, freshman linebacker CJ Allen stepped in and never relinquished his role. Malaki Starks stepped on campus at as a freshman and beat out multiple blue-chip recruits to start in his first college game.

With so many players returning, we have a pretty good feel of what Georgia’s two-deep will look like week one against Clemson, but don’t be shocked if there are a couple of surprises from younger players.