Stepping out of Nick Saban’s shadow, Kirby Smart takes over as dean of SEC coaches

ONE OF THE last things Kirby Smart said to Nick Saban last December at midfield of Mercedes-Benz Stadium following the SEC championship game proved to be prophetic.

“You can’t keep doing this much longer,” Smart joked with his former boss.

Alabama and Saban had just beaten Georgia and Smart — again — and five weeks later, Saban’s legendary coaching career would come to an end when he announced his retirement after 17 seasons and six national championships in Tuscaloosa. Before leading Georgia on a remarkable run of its own, Smart was part of four of those national titles as Saban’s defensive coordinator.

Granted, Saban hasn’t gone far, joining ESPN’s “College GameDay” crew. But he has traded the sideline stage for the TV stage, and for his suite during Alabama home games, which is where he will be Saturday night when Smart leads his No. 2 Bulldogs into Bryant-Denny Stadium to face No. 4 Alabama in one of the most anticipated matchups of the season (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC/ESPN+).

In eight seasons under Smart, Georgia has won two national titles, played for a third and won 13 or more games in each of the past three seasons. For all of Smart’s dizzying success, his only kryptonite was Saban. In fact, the last coach other than Saban to beat Smart was Dan Mullen at Florida in 2020, and Mullen is now an ESPN analyst as well.

Not counting Smart’s first season at Georgia in 2016, he has lost just 11 games. Five of those were to Saban, although Smart’s only win against Saban, in 2021, sent the Bulldogs to their first national championship in 41 years when they beat the Crimson Tide 33-18 in Indianapolis. Georgia repeated as national champs the next year, the first team to do so since Alabama in 2011 and 2012, and the Bulldogs won an SEC-record 29 straight games before losing to Alabama and Saban last season in the SEC championship game, costing them a spot in the College Football Playoff.

Who could blame Smart if he were to steal a quick glance across the field during pregame warmups Saturday to make sure Saban isn’t standing on the other sideline, still casting a shadow over Smart and the rest of the sport?

“I feel like he’s still in it, so I don’t really see it as there being a shadow,” Smart told ESPN. “He’s announcing. He’s still involved. He’s still trying to make things right in our game, with Congress or whomever. He ain’t going nowhere. This dude loves it, and he is going to be part of it for a long time. The game is better with him in it. I just have so much respect for him.

“He’s just not coaching anymore, and I don’t get any more chances to beat him.”

Only 48, Smart is far from finished. In fact, he might just be getting started. And not that he really cares, but with Saban retired, Smart has become the face of college football (at least from a coaching standpoint), and in many respects, one of the sport’s most salient voices. He’s the co-chair of the NCAA Football Rules Committee and the architect of a football machine that has produced more NFL first-round draft picks (17) than Smart has had losses (16) in eight seasons at Georgia.

“He understands what’s good for the game, what’s bad for the game. He’s on top of the sport right now,” said Dan Lanning, who was Smart’s defensive coordinator before becoming Oregon’s head coach two years ago. “He’s separated himself and put himself in a category of his own.”

But Smart wants no part of the Saban comparisons, and with good reason. Smart said probably nobody has impacted college football more than Saban, and that the precedent Saban set on the field is something everyone, himself included, will be chasing for a long time.

“We’ve been really good the last few years and had a lot of success and I’m certainly thankful for that. But in no way, shape or form does that put me on the pedestal or the statue that he was on,” Smart said. “I think there’s a group of people out there leading their programs who are really good coaches, and they’re lucky to have the programs that they do.

“But I don’t see it as a one-person spot or role or whatever word you want to use for it right now, not with him gone. I see it as a lot of guys out there competing and seeing who’s going to be the best and who’s going to have the next run — if there is one.”

With Saban’s phenomenal career at Alabama over, it’s Smart’s time to be front and center in the pressure cooker, and it will be fascinating to see how his image, job and life change — if they change at all — with his nemesis and mentor no longer coaching. Those who know Smart best suggest he has already laid the pathway to continued success.

“Nobody had more of a front-row seat to how Coach [Saban] did it than Kirby,” said Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, who was the offensive coordinator on Alabama’s 2015 national championship team when Smart was the defensive coordinator.

“You see a lot of what made [Saban] so great in what Kirby’s doing at Georgia, the way they recruit, the development of players, the organization, the size, length and physicality of the players. A lot of people who’ve come through there have tried to copy [Saban’s] model. As you’ve seen, it’s a lot easier said than done. It’s also the reason very few of us ever beat him, even Kirby.”

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BARRY ODOM, NOW the head coach at UNLV, entered the SEC head-coaching octagon at Missouri in 2016, the same year Smart was hired at Georgia, both taking the reins at their alma maters. Odom made it four years before being fired. Smart replaced Mark Richt after working under Saban for 10 consecutive seasons, including with the Miami Dolphins in 2006.

Odom said Smart is too focused on what’s right in front of him to let anything change him or the way he runs his program.

“He doesn’t have any blind spots. He’s elite, and I think he’ll go down in the history of college football as one of the best coaches ever,” Odom said. “And the crazy thing is there’s no drop-off. He has done it every single year.”

Georgia is the only team in the country to be ranked in the top seven of the final AP poll each of the past seven seasons, and Smart has been at his best in some of the biggest games. He has won five straight AP top-five matchups, one shy of the longest such streak ever by a head coach. Lou Holtz won six straight from 1988-90 at Notre Dame, and Saban won six in a row from 2017-18.

Before taking over the Bulldogs, Smart had several chances to leave Alabama for other jobs while working for Saban. When Gus Malzahn was hired at Auburn prior to the 2013 season, there was support on the Plains to hire Smart, especially from former coach Pat Dye, but Smart had promised Saban he would stay on as defensive coordinator through the national championship game. Then-Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs and the search committee were uncomfortable with the thought of the new coach at Auburn staying at rival Alabama for another month and helping lead the Tide to a national title.

There were other opportunities, too. Smart was South Carolina’s top target to fill its vacancy following the 2015 season after Steve Spurrier resigned midseason and was meeting with representatives from the school the day Richt was fired as Georgia’s head coach. Heading into the 2012 season, he was the front-runner at Southern Miss but withdrew his name from consideration. Richt even made a lucrative offer to lure Smart back to Georgia to be his defensive coordinator in 2011.

“Kirby’s done as good a job as anybody in college football, and he was patient and smart when he was [at Alabama] to wait for the right job,” Saban said. “Kirby had the right perspective on things. So many coaches take jobs because they think, whether it’s money or the title, that it’s going to promote their career. The only thing that promotes your career is winning, and we were in a great position here to continue winning and having really good defenses.

“Some guys aren’t patient enough to do that, but Kirby was and it paid off for him. He got what is probably the best job in the SEC and made it even better.”

It wasn’t a total rebuild for Smart as Richt had averaged nearly 10 wins a season, but getting the players to buy into his way of doing things didn’t happen overnight. Georgia lost five games his first season, including losses to Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt.

“I wanted more than relevance. I wanted dominance,” Smart said of his mindset when taking the Georgia job. “I wanted to be consistent. I wanted to be competing for national championships and be very consistent, and that’s the one thing that I’m most proud of, the consistency that we’ve shown.”

Going back to his playing days, Smart has usually gotten what he has wanted. His former teammates and coach at Georgia, Jim Donnan, never doubted Smart had the right temperament, intelligence and savvy to take a perennial top-20 program under Richt to the level where it would start stacking up championship trophies. Richt’s teams won at least 10 games in four of his final five seasons, but Georgia’s last SEC championship was in 2005. Smart was the running backs coach on that team, and it was also a productive year for him away from football. He met his wife, Mary Beth, who was working in the athletic association’s business office and played basketball at Georgia.

Donnan, who lives in Athens and remains close to the program, remembers seeing Smart, then a sophomore, tutor future Pro Football Hall of Famer Champ Bailey on the practice field when Bailey was a freshman in 1996.

“Kirby knew everything, what guys at every position were supposed to do. He was outgoing and demanding,” said Donnan, who gave Smart his coaching start in 1999 as an administrative assistant. Donnan took over as Georgia’s coach in 1996 after Ray Goff was fired. Smart had just finished his freshman season under Goff, and Donnan immediately knew he had a special leader in Smart.

“When you take over a program, there’s always going to be some doubters among the players that were there with the other coach,” Donnan said. “But right away, Kirby was very good about adjusting to me and not saying, ‘Hey, we didn’t used to do it that way.’ He made sure nobody else did either, and basically said, ‘Get on or get off.’ Even as a second-year player, he had the other guys’ respect.”

Matt Stinchcomb, now a television analyst for ESPN, was a two-time All-America offensive tackle at Georgia and played all four seasons (1995-98) with Smart.

“You’re dealing with an incredibly driven, high-capacity, high-horsepower guy who’s on go every second of every day,” Stinchcomb said. “He was the same way as a player, very demanding and forthright, and would communicate it whether you liked what he said or not, and I do think that has served him well in this capacity.

“I don’t think that he is careless with how he communicates, but he won’t let the importance of a message be diminished by how it might be received. If it needs to be said, it’s going to get said.”

Smart reminds his players often that humility in the SEC is only a week away. Two weeks ago, Georgia looked very beatable in a sluggish 13-12 win at Kentucky, and that might have been the perfect teaching moment for Smart as he got his team ready for Alabama during a bye week. The Tide have a chance to win their ninth game in the teams’ past 10 meetings, this time with first-year coach Kalen DeBoer at the helm. Smart (28-12) and DeBoer (8-2) are the only two current coaches in the SEC with winning records against teams that finished the season ranked in the final AP poll.

“The wind blows pretty hard up there at the top,” Stinchcomb said. “I don’t see [the Bulldogs] toppling, but when you grow the beast the way Kirby has, it only gets harder.”

It’s exactly what Smart signed up for when he took the job. He was undaunted by the gaudy expectations at a place that many around college football considered one of the sport’s biggest underachievers given how long it had been since Georgia last won a national championship — 1980 with Herschel Walker leading the way.

Perhaps the only other coach in the past two decades to walk in under that kind of pressure at his alma mater was Jim Harbaugh when he returned to Michigan in 2015.

Even Harbaugh didn’t match Smart’s early success, especially in the games that mattered most. Harbaugh lost five straight to rival Ohio State, which put a damper on his three 10-win seasons in his first five years in Ann Arbor. But he finally broke through and beat Ohio State each of his final three seasons, winning the Big Ten all three years and the national title in 2023.

“The thing about Kirby is he’s won so much so fast,” said North Carolina’s Mack Brown, who was at Texas eight years before winning a national championship. “Coach [Barry] Switzer said it best. He said that you create a monster, and it’s hard to keep that monster fed because he gets hungry.”

Last Saturday, an ESPN reporter was with Switzer at the Oklahoma-Tennessee game in Norman, Oklahoma, when a fan asked him, “I saw Coach Saban said college football is going to the dogs. What’s he talking about?”

“I think he was talking about Georgia,” Switzer said, laughing. “They’re beating everybody’s ass.”

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JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY who came through the Alabama program when Saban and Smart were there together will tell you that Smart is probably the most like Saban of any of his former assistants.

And, yet, Smart didn’t try to be a Saban clone.

“If you were going to replicate [Saban], Kirby would be the one,” said Arkansas State athletic director Jeff Purinton, who came to Alabama in 2007 with Saban and worked as closely as anybody with him outside the football staff as associate athletic director for football communications.

“Think about how long and how much those two were together going back to when Kirby was at LSU with [Saban] in 2004. They were in the defensive back room together every day, both relentless recruiters. They’re a lot alike, but Kirby was also going to be his own guy and put his stamp on it.”

And for the record, Smart was always on Saban’s team in the staff’s lunchtime 3-on-3 basketball games.

“I was the damn commissioner. I picked the teams,” Saban said.

Smart said being able to use Saban’s blueprint was important, but joked “not as important as having good players and good facilities.”

His feel for his alma mater, Georgia’s geographic footprint for recruiting and the history of the program provided Smart advantages that a lot of former Saban assistants didn’t necessarily have when they landed head jobs.

“There are a lot of positives about this place that some of those other folks didn’t have, but I think you get comfortable in your own skin and you make decisions on things you want to do,” Smart said. “I definitely think I’ve changed during the time I’ve been here and it’s not as similar to Alabama as it was when I first got here. But even Nick evolved every year I was there.

“You’ve got to. You either evolve or you die, and we’ve certainly done that here.”

Smart, whose father, Sonny, was a high school football coach and mother, Sharon, was an English teacher, has been willing to listen and accept new ideas, even though he can be unbending on some of the most minute details.

“I like input. I like smart people around me,” Smart said. “It’s not a dictatorship deal. You make good decisions when you have good people around you.”

Just as Saban worked closely with sports psychologist Kevin Elko for two decades, Smart brought in Drew Brannon, a sports psychologist partnered with AMPLOS and based in Greenville, South Carolina, in 2020. Brannon had worked with Georgia athletes in the past, and Smart came out of the 2020 COVID season feeling as if something were missing in his program.

“Don’t underestimate the difference that made,” said Neyland Raper, who was Smart’s director of football operations before taking a job as the Big 12’s director of football operations and competition in July. “We had skull sessions with the players where they got up and told their stories. We formed small groups, and we did surveys with the players, trying to find more connectivity. You could see it transforming.

“Clemson was always the beacon of culture and Alabama the beacon of talent, and we moved to where we were somewhere in the middle ground. It’s worked because in this era of NIL and the money being paid, you wouldn’t believe how many kids who are really good players take a discount to come to Georgia. But, hey, that’s why they’re winning because players aren’t going there just for the money.”

For all the success on the field, it has been a turbulent year and a half off the field for Smart and the Georgia program. Players have continued to run afoul of the law with driving-related incidents, even after a fatal crash in January 2023 where recruiting staff member Chandler LeCroy and former player Devin Willock were killed while racing a car driven by star defensive lineman Jalen Carter. Both cars were traveling at more than 100 mph, and police said alcohol was involved in the crash.

There have been at least 20 arrests or citations involving players for driving-related violations, including DUI, speeding and reckless driving. Two of the most recent players to be arrested — running back Trevor Etienne (a DUI charge that was pleaded down) and cornerback Daniel Harris (a reckless driving charge after police said he was clocked at 106 mph) — missed playing time. Etienne was suspended for the season opener against Clemson, and Harris was held out of the win over Kentucky two weeks ago.

Smart said the issues have been addressed repeatedly and that punishment, including taking away players’ NIL money, has been doled out even if it’s not announced publicly.

“I’ll say what I’ve been saying, and that is that we’ve worked very hard with our administration to try to prevent it and stop it, and most importantly, keep everybody safe,” Smart said. “We’ve got to find a way to do that.”

On the field, what has separated Georgia, winner of 42 straight regular-season games under Smart, is the same thing that fueled Alabama’s dominance under Saban.

“We worked our ass off in recruiting,” Saban said. “We got good players and then we did a good job of developing the players. If you look at recent history, Georgia is having a No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 recruiting class every year, and they’re doing a great job of developing those really good players. So the combination of those two things has put them in the position to be one of the dominant programs in the country, probably the most dominant.”

Quarterback Carson Beck said the competition and depth of talent on the practice field has been the secret sauce under Smart, and it was the same way with Saban at Alabama. Smart squeezes out the uncompetitive, those players who simply aren’t a fit.

“If you’re afraid of competition, Georgia is the wrong place for you,” Beck said. “And if you don’t want to be coached hard and coached that way every single day, Coach Smart is the wrong coach for you.”

Practices at Alabama under Saban weren’t for the squeamish. He was constantly on the move, barking at coaches and players alike, and his way of getting his point across wouldn’t have been rated PG. Smart is the same way, only he has a microphone, and his voice reverberates — especially once the trees begin to lose their leaves in the fall — throughout the Five Points neighborhood behind the Georgia practice fields.

“I mean, it starts from the top down,” Beck said. “That’s every big business, every team, and Coach [Smart] is the pinnacle. There’s no let-up. He’s at the top and it’s going to work all the way down.”

Smart’s personality and connection with his players have shown through loudly (and with explicit language) in videos of his impassioned locker room speeches that have appeared on social media in recent years.

“It’s like any family,” he said. “You’re most honest with the people you care the most about.”

Family is important to Smart. He allowed co-defensive coordinator Will Muschamp, one of his closest confidants, to transition to an analyst’s role, freeing up Muschamp and his wife, Carol, to travel on weekends to watch their son, Whit, play at Vanderbilt. Smart has made similar arrangements so assistant coaches could be at their kids’ activities.

“When Kirby’s not in the football building or recruiting, he’s with his family,” Donnan said.

Smart’s penchant for having a hand in everything that touches his program is renowned. As control freaks go in the coaching ranks, and there are many, Smart is at or near the top. And if you think Smart is all-knowing when it comes to his football team, Donnan said you ought to see him at one of his three kids’ sporting events. His youngest son, Andrew, played in the Little League World Series this summer.

“He’s a good dad, and he can tell you everything about every kid on the team, knows all their strengths and weaknesses,” Donnan said. “I mean, he’s talking about the left fielder, knows which kids won’t swing the bat, which ones go after bad pitches.

“He doesn’t miss a whole lot.”

But, then, he learned from the best.