Kirby Smart and Georgia Defied the Ghosts of Program Past. The Future Could Be College Football History.

It is the second day of the first event that signals the pending arrival of football season in the South, and grown men in red and black T-shirts have packed the lobby of the Grand Hyatt in Nashville, eager for a glimpse of their king. Some crane their necks, straining to see the coach who delivered what so many Georgia fans believed would never come. Others record the scene with their phones. A few, sporadically but loudly, bark like dogs. Kirby Smart does not slow down as he walks through the front doors, flanked by communication staffers on his way to the ballroom. “Kirby plans every second of every day,” says Loran Smith, the University of Georgia’s athletics historian and the coauthor of a book with Smart. “He doesn’t want to waste a single second.”

Smart is the center of attention at SEC media days 2023, the head coach whose remarks are most anticipated, whose team will be most discussed by SEC Network talking heads. It’s a position typically held by Smart’s mentor turned rival, Alabama coach Nick Saban. Yet with Georgia reigning as college football’s two-time defending national champions, the sport’s hierarchy has shifted. Not that Smart seems to register this. Like anyone baptized in Saban’s process, he seems aware of nothing but the next meeting, the next snap, the next call or text to a recruit. “All we’re thinking about,” he says, “is the next 24 hours. How can we get better in the next 24 hours?”

After some opening remarks, the questions begin. When asked about his summer vacation, Smart says his wife, Mary Beth, wanted to visit Italy’s Amalfi Coast. But as a South Georgia native, Smart doesn’t like straying too far from SEC country. So instead, the couple vacationed in Mississippi to watch their son play travel baseball. “I enjoyed every minute of that,” Smart says. (Of note: Saban took three weeks off this summer for an anniversary trip with his wife to, well, Italy. Though perhaps he texted as many recruits from Positano as Smart did from Southaven.)

Smart is also asked about his program’s response to tragedy. In January, Georgia offensive lineman Devin Willock and recruiting staffer Chandler LeCroy were killed in a car crash. LeCroy, the driver, had a blood alcohol level more than double the legal limit and was racing, according to police. Star defensive tackle and first-round 2023 draft pick Jalen Carter was charged with reckless driving and racing in connection to the fatal crash. “We love them,” Smart says of Willock and LeCroy, “and we miss them.” Since then, linebacker Jamon Dumas-Johnson was arrested for a separate street-racing incident that police said occurred several days before the fatal crash; wide receiver Marcus Rosemy-Jacksaint and linebacker Samuel M’Pemba both received citations for speeding; and receiver De’Nylon Morrissette was arrested and charged with DUI. “I’m disappointed any time we have traffic incidents,” Smart says when asked by Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde about the incidents. “We don’t want that to happen. We’re going to do all we can to take that out and make sure that’s eradicated.”

Mostly, though, Smart is asked about the upcoming season. Georgia has a chance to do what no college football program has done in nearly a century: win a third consecutive national championship. Only the Minnesota Golden Gophers of 1934, 1935, and 1936 have ever gone back-to-back-to-back. “We’re a long way from that,” Smart says. Yet he acknowledges the possibility has been in his mind, and in his players’ minds, so much that they’ve studied how the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s achieved what so few teams in any sport ever have. (In major American sports, only the Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers and UConn women’s basketball have pulled off a three-peat this century.) “I don’t care about the three-peat, the two-peat, the one-peat,” Smart says. “I care about complacency. And if the focus is on that, not on outcomes, I think the rest will take care of itself.”

The Bulldogs’ recent run of success can be attributed to a number of factors, including scheme, player development, and staff continuity. Essentially, though, Georgia has emerged as the sport’s new gold standard for two reasons. One, Smart recruits the best high school players in the country. (Or nearly the best—Alabama is still right there.) And two, he motivates those players to work as if no one actually thinks they’re good.

Evidence of this second point became abundant after the Bulldogs finished their 65-7 rout of TCU in January’s national championship game. “Everybody doubted them,” Smart said of his players in the moments following the final whistle. This was how you ended up with a Heisman Trophy finalist, quarterback Stetson Bennett IV, saying to fans, “Y’all kept telling us how bad we were. And we kept winning.” How you got Nolan Smith, once the top-ranked recruit in the country, according to the 247Sports composite rankings, wandering around the field shouting about everyone who didn’t believe in him or his team, claiming “the media” picked them to go 7-5 even though the Bulldogs were voted no. 3 in the preseason AP poll. Smith, for his part, recently admitted on the Saturday Down South podcast that he made up the 7-5 predictions, fully aware that no reasonable media member would be so dumb. “You gotta create the whole narrative,” he said. “Sometimes you gotta put the chip on your own shoulder.” Smith continued, delighted with himself. “Sometimes you gotta juice it up for the guys. … I said it the whole summer, ‘They going to think we’re going 7-5 guys, they ain’t even thinking about a two-peat.’”

At the SEC media days podium, Smart takes a calmer tone. “I’ve never said people think we’re gonna be 7-5,” he says. “We expect to be good at the University of Georgia.”

As a lifelong Georgia fan, I have found all of this—the dominance, the blasting of invented haters, the slow-building consensus that UGA has taken the mantle as the premier program in the sport—to be extremely disorienting. Until January 2022, Georgia had not won a football national title in my lifetime. I had accepted my lot as the fan of a program defined by heartbreak, and had even come to find some cruel comfort in the familiarity of crushing almosts. I became adept at rattling off the cruelest losses: Florida in 2002, Auburn in 2005, Alabama in 2012 (and in 2015, and in 2018, and then in 2018 again). Five years ago, before Georgia’s debut appearance in the College Football Playoff national championship game, I spent a week driving around the state for a piece exploring the tortured existence of my fellow Bulldogs fans. The day after that story was published, Georgia suffered its cruelest defeat of all, blowing a 13-point second-half lead to Alabama as Tua Tagovailoa delivered a game-winning bomb to DeVonta Smith in overtime. That night, my wife woke up to find me sitting upright in the dark, sometime after 2 a.m., muttering why, why, why before collapsing back in the bed.

And now: this. A chance at history. A program so loaded it lost nine players to the NFL draft after the 2021 season and came back even better in 2022. A roster replacing its starting quarterback and the sport’s most dominant defensive lineman that is still the clear 2023 preseason favorite to win it all. A team that Paul Finebaum, the mouth of the SEC and a man known for his Alabama ties, has declared as the new king of the sport.

So, on the eve of a season in which the Dawgs will be chasing history, I returned to my home state to hear from fans, former players, and others close to the program about what this ride has been like, and about what they expect to come next. One of the first people I called after crossing the state line: Rusty Mansell. He’s a longtime recruiting reporter, and few people can more readily pinpoint the reasons for the Bulldogs’ rise. Mansell remembers playing high school football in Rome, Georgia, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and developing a deep fascination with where the best players in the state were choosing to play their college ball. “It was almost impossible,” he says, “to follow recruiting back then. But I had my ways.”

He remembers 1-900 numbers, which die-hard fans could call to hear from self-styled recruiting reporters on where the state’s best players were leaning. He remembers an annual recruiting magazine published by Forrest Davis, one of the first analysts to assign high school players in the state a star rating. “Everyone had a guy,” Mansell says, referring to the nebulous figures who moved in and around major programs, dropping bits of knowledge to less connected fans. “You’d hear from people, ‘I know a guy who knows [former Georgia coach] Ray Goff, and he says so-and-so down in Savannah might be the best player in the state.’ You had to figure out who really had a guy, and who just had a guy who thought he was a guy.”

When Scout and Rivals launched in the early aughts, the two sites made recruiting coverage accessible to the college football masses. Mansell started recording games for Scout in 2007 while working a corporate job, and over time he transitioned into covering Georgia recruiting full-time. Now the co-owner and publisher of DawgsHQ on the On3 network, he has become the Forrest Davis of the message board era. “Recruiting,” Mansell says, “is what gives fans hope. No matter how good or bad a year you’re having, if you know who’s coming next, you can feel that hope for the future.”

Georgia always has recruited well. “Going back to the 1960s,” says Loran Smith, the UGA historian, “Georgia’s always been a great state for football players. And we got our fair share to come to Athens.” Under Mark Richt, the school’s head coach from 2001 to 2015, Georgia never finished outside the top 15 in Rivals’ rankings, and finished outside the top 10 only three times. Richt, of course, was known as a very good coach and a very good recruiter in a period and place when very good would never be good enough. His teams won the SEC twice but never played for a national championship. Each time they got close—in 2002, 2007, and 2012—one brutal loss kept them on the outside looking in. Says Smith: “I don’t think Mark Richt proved to have the edge he needed to make that leap forward.”

After Smart took the job before the 2016 season, he started to show just how high Georgia’s ceiling was. Beginning with his first full-cycle recruiting class in 2017, Georgia has never finished lower than fourth in the 247Sports composite recruiting rankings, and has finished first twice. “Kirby, right or wrong, never turns his switch off,” Mansell says. “He’s relentless.” After Georgia fired Richt in 2015 and began courting Smart for the job, Smart demanded the kind of resources that Saban has at Alabama and that Richt never had at Georgia. Among them: a nearly limitless recruiting budget to allow for efficient travel to see any prized prospect in the country, and a small army of recruiting staffers. “Now, if you’re an inside linebackers coach,” Mansell says, “you have a guy in charge of watching recruiting tape for you. So instead of you spending all this time watching 40 players, you go to a guy you trust and say, ‘Give me the five you like.’ And you focus on them. It makes you a thousand times more efficient at doing your job.”

Mansell tells a story. “In 2012, Richt had a five-star recruit trying to go in the locker room after a game, and he got locked out. They didn’t mean to do it, but logistically, they didn’t have enough room and enough personnel to make sure that kid gets in there.” After recent facilities renovations under Smart, Georgia now has a separate locker room for recruits, and a pathway to get from there to the team’s locker room, without ever going outside. “You don’t risk getting lost. You don’t risk having to deal with fans. You don’t risk anything. You make that experience as easy and comfortable as possible, so that recruit gets to be exactly where they want him to be, every step of the way. Kirby made sure that kind of story would never happen again at Georgia.”

Georgia’s recruiting budget has also allowed coaches to pursue top players anywhere they can find them. “Kirby is coast-to-coast,” Mansell says. “If you can play, he will go get you.” Brock Bowers, Georgia’s tight end and perhaps the best player in all of college football, is from Napa, California. Kelee Ringo, whose pick-six sealed Georgia’s January 2022 national championship win over Alabama and who was just drafted by the Eagles, is from Arizona. So is Dylan Raiola, a quarterback and the top-rated player in the 2024 class, per 247Sports, who is committed to Georgia. Some of the team’s recruiting wins closer to home are even more impressive. The metro Atlanta area is so loaded with premier talent that Alabama and other elite programs often lure five-stars from Georgia’s backyard, but the Bulldogs have begun to return the favor. Georgia plucked blue-chip receiver (and rising Pittsburgh Steelers star) George Pickens from Hoover, Alabama, just 45 minutes up the road from Tuscaloosa. In the 2023 class, Georgia secured a commitment from the top player in Saban’s state.

The first step in luring players from all corners of the U.S. is to find and evaluate talent. The program’s infrastructure helps with that. The second step? Convincing those players to move thousands of miles from home. Why do so many want to do that?

“That’s easy,” Mansell says. “Georgia’s putting kids in the NFL. That’s all there is to it.”

Photo by Steve Limentani/ISI Photos/Getty Images

Georgia’s program, Mansell points out, “is not for everyone.” He’s heard from some players that the Bulldogs’ practices are too demanding. They insist on maintaining the ritual of “Bloody Tuesdays”—full-contact, physical practices early in the week, every week, all season. “Sometimes you see blood,” Jamon Dumas-Johnson said of the Tuesday practices earlier this year. “Sometimes you don’t. … But that’s one of the days we get after it, play the game before the game. Tuesdays are just different in Athens.”

As much as recruiting dominance has elevated Georgia toward the top of the sport, talent acquisition alone can’t propel a team to back-to-back national titles. Alabama’s 2022 roster was even more talented, per 247, with Ohio State just behind, and both Texas A&M and Clemson lurking a half tier down. And sure, of the Bulldogs’ recent first-round NFL draft picks, several were five-star recruits, including Travon Walker, Nolan Smith, and Broderick Jones. But Eagles first-round defensive lineman Jordan Davis was a three-star recruit, ranked outside the top 400 in his class. Same goes for Packers first-round corner Eric Stokes. Stetson Bennett, of course, went from being a walk-on to a Heisman finalist, a two-time national champion, and a fourth-round NFL draft pick at quarterback. A couple of other walk-ons, Mekhi Mews and Cash Jones, figure to play significant roles in Georgia’s offense this year.

“It’s a place,” says Justin Shaffer, a three-star guard who started 27 games at Georgia and was drafted in the 2022 sixth round by the Atlanta Falcons, “where you get better every single day.” I talk to Shaffer and former Georgia tight end John FitzPatrick one afternoon at Falcons camp, where both push through an indoor session footsteps away from oppressive heat, each fighting to cling to a roster spot as NFL training camp nears its end. (Shaffer would ultimately be cut.) Both Shaffer and FitzPatrick arrived at Georgia with talent, but without any degree of certainty that the NFL was in their future. Neither starred for the Bulldogs. But that’s the thing about this era of Georgia football. If you can make it onto the field in Athens, even as a role player, you have a chance to make an NFL roster. Every starter from Georgia’s 2021 defense has now been drafted. Five of the 11 went in the first round in 2022.

“Going against guys like Jordan Davis, Jalen Carter, Travon Walker, Devonte Wyatt every single day in practice, those guys just made me better every day,” Shaffer says. “No matter if we were in full gear or in jerseys, we were gonna go at it.”

This blueprint, of course, feels familiar to college football fans. Recruiting dominance, pulling top talent from across the country to a college town in the Southeast. Building toughness up and down the roster, from the line of scrimmage to the secondary. Motivating players by amplifying any kernel of doubt from pundits or fans. And when that fails, inventing doubters that don’t exist.

Every piece of it has worked for Smart and Georgia just as it’s worked for Saban and Alabama. For years, Saban’s “process” seemed impossible to replicate. His former assistants failed, often spectacularly, in head-coaching jobs across the SEC. There were Jeremy Pruitt and Derek Dooley at Tennessee, Jim McElwain and Will Muschamp at Florida. It’s a stretch to say that Smart has improved on Saban’s blueprint, but at least for the moment, he has built a program that sits above his former boss’s, on college football’s throne.

Smart has done more than just emulate Saban’s model, though. He’s left his own imprint on what it takes to build a perennial juggernaut. Back at media days, Smart brings up one word time and again. “Retention,” he says, “is the key to sustaining success.” He thinks a lot, he says, about retaining staff, which means allowing coaches and others who work for him plenty of time away from the facility, to spend with their families, so that they don’t get burned out and start looking around for other jobs. Both Georgia and Alabama regularly lose assistants to college head-coaching jobs and NFL coordinator jobs, but Smart has managed to keep some measure of consistency in his assistants in recent years. Alabama’s coordinator positions, meanwhile, have begun to feel like revolving doors.

Smart also thinks a lot about retaining young players, which, in the era of the transfer portal, has become more difficult than ever. “It’s only that hard,” Smart says, “if you don’t recruit the right people.” He says his staff evaluates players on love of the game and on selflessness. Once they arrive, he says, “We’ve invested in them as freshmen, as sophomores. They’ve seen the return on investment for older players that stuck around.” He points to linebacker Quay Walker as an example, an elite recruit who didn’t start until his junior year and then went in the first round of the draft after his senior year.

Like any program, Georgia has sustained a few transfer-portal losses. Two contributors from last year’s title team, receiver AD Mitchell and defensive lineman Bear Alexander, left for Texas and USC, respectively, this offseason. But so many others who arrived as heralded recruits and did not instantly see playing time have made the choice to stay. “I was frustrated,” says linebacker Channing Tindall, who arrived in Athens as a five-star recruit in 2018 but didn’t see many immediate snaps. He knew what he could do. He wanted to show it. He thought about transferring. Ultimately, though, he stayed. “I want to be the best inside linebacker in the world,” Tindall says. “To do that, I’ve gotta go against the best every day. I told myself, if I can do it here, I can do it anywhere. I’d rather go ahead and face that adversity here than wait and face it later in life.”

Tindall, a 2022 third-round pick who’s now with the Dolphins, points to a high-profile sequence that illustrated the kind of challenge he craved at Georgia. In the January 2022 national championship game, he missed a pass coverage assignment; fellow linebacker Nakobe Dean made up for his mistake, breaking up a would-be touchdown pass by Alabama’s Bryce Young. Afterward, Dean lit into Tindall, yelling his frustrations for everyone in the building and watching at home to see. On the very next play, Tindall chased down Young in the backfield, killing the Crimson Tide drive with a sack. “I knew I made a mistake, and I knew they were gonna hold me accountable,” he says. “That’s what you want from your teammates. That’s just what we do.”

Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Again, as a fan, none of this feels real. I explain this feeling one afternoon in August while sitting at an English pub in Athens with Tony Waller and Will Leitch, the cohosts, along with Scott Duvall, of the Georgia fan podcast Waitin’ Since Last Saturday. Waller graduated from UGA with a bachelor’s degree in 1990 and a law degree in 1993, and he rooted for the Bulldogs for many years before that. He met Leitch, a sportswriter and novelist and the founder of Deadspin, when Leitch moved to Athens in 2013. They tailgate together, watch games together, and drink bourbon and record their podcast together every week during the fall. But they represent two vastly different experiences of Georgia fanhood. Waller is a dyed-in-the-wool obsessive, someone who can pull out bits of trivia mid-conversation. (“Who started at quarterback when Quincy Carter got hurt in 2000?” he asks me, and when I fail to think of the answer, he gives it. “Cory Phillips.”) He has spent more hours on Bulldogs message boards than many would admit, and he remembers every slight, every loss, every five-star recruit to pass through the program and many who didn’t. Leitch, on the other hand, has constructed his Georgia allegiance in adulthood, first through his marriage to a UGA grad and now during their life together in Athens.

I explain to them that I’m having a hard time adjusting to this new reality. That I can register that Georgia has won two consecutive national titles, but I can’t let myself believe the Bulldogs are actually the standard-bearing program in the sport. Because while there is no more glaring evidence than two consecutive national championships, one fact remains true: Smart has still beaten Saban only once, in the January 2022 national title game. Saban has beaten Smart four times.

“That’s not unfair,” Waller says. “But it’s an objective reality. That’s just who Georgia is right now. And if it’s an objective reality, then it can be a subjective reality to me.”

Leitch jumps in. “I would say the average fan doesn’t feel that way,” he says. While Leitch considers himself a Georgia fan, he seems most comfortable in the role of Georgia fan observer, studying a species he lives among but does not fully belong to. He’s fluent in the language of Dawg fandom but still speaks it with an accent, able to make proclamations about the fan base’s mentality with a slight sense of remove. “My theory is that Georgia fans have held onto that mentality—‘We’re never going to get it, we’re never going to get there’—like a phantom limb.”

Familiarity is comforting, even when you’re most familiar with heartbreak. Cursed fandom becomes an identity. You take pride in your ability to suffer with your team. And so getting comfortable with success feels dangerous. “The average Georgia fan,” says Leitch, “they’re excited to be winning, but it feels like something that can be stripped away from them at any moment.” He makes a comparison to two of baseball’s longest-suffering fan bases: the Red Sox and Cubs. After Boston won the World Series in 2004, Red Sox fans, he says, “just all turned into assholes.” Cubs fans, on the other hand, “reverted back very quickly to, ‘Oh, woe is us.’”

The fate of Georgia fans remains to be decided. For one, they haven’t lost yet. And given the way this season’s schedule is set up, it might be a long time before they do. While anything can happen in college football—and Georgia nearly lost at Missouri last year—the Bulldogs don’t appear to have any particularly losable games until they visit Tennessee in November.

This team has its question marks. The new starting quarterback, Carson Beck, is a fourth-year junior who has never played a meaningful snap and does not have the five-star pedigree of QBs at other contending programs across the country. The running back corps has plenty of talent, but has suffered a number of injuries, as sophomore Branson Robinson will miss the entire season with a ruptured patellar tendon. The defensive line lost its anchor, Eagles first-round pick Jalen Carter, and one of his potential heirs apparent, Alexander.

And so while Georgia is a near-unanimous preseason no. 1 in both the AP and Coaches polls, a few pundits have expressed concern. When ESPN broadcast its College GameDay preseason special, all three analysts—Desmond Howard, Kirk Herbstreit, and Pat McAfee—picked Alabama to win the SEC. None picked Georgia to win the College Football Playoff.

Here, again, is a sliver of evidence in favor of Georgia players’ preferred narrative. The gall of three men to sit on national television and declare that maybe, just maybe, some other team might end the season as the national champion. It’s not hard to imagine one small slight taking on the shape of many more slights, real and exaggerated and invented whole cloth, all used to fuel yet another crusade against doubters that ends with red and black confetti raining from the sky in Houston next January.

For all the surreal images Georgia fans have played on loop, there’s one that’s perhaps most poignant as a new season dawns. It’s Smart at SoFi Stadium, moments after Georgia dismantled TCU to win its second straight title, smiling as he greeted and celebrated with traveling fans. He held up one finger, and the crowd roared. Then he held up a second finger, and the crowd roared louder still.

Smart says he thinks only about the next 24 hours, and that he wants his players to do the same. But that night in Los Angeles, minutes after his second title, Smart seemed to let himself imagine a faraway future for a moment, a future in which the Bulldogs pull off what hasn’t been done in nearly a century. As he grinned at the crowd, two fingers held up high, Smart hesitated for just a moment until he finally, exuberantly, lifted a third.