Bohls: Off-the-field chaos and history side against Georgia's bid for a third title

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Kirby Smart proudly mentioned that he completed his bachelor’s degree with an impressive 3.50 GPA as a defensive back at Georgia and was a four-time member of the SEC academic honor roll.

His major?

Finance.

He might have wished he had chosen to study history because the current Bulldogs head coach hopes to make some of his own.

Just don’t tell him that.

Oh, he’s intent on following up Georgia’s back-to-back national championships with a third in a row, something that hasn’t been done in college football since the Minnesota Golden Gophers pulled it off from 1934 through 1936, as that Big Ten club won five national titles in eight years. A bit removed from the modern era.

Smart hasn’t dwelled extensively on that subject with his new team, which returns 13 starters from the club that crushed TCU in January, but he’s clearly aware of the challenge ahead. Ten other teams in Georgia's position, including Alabama on three occasions and Oklahoma twice, failed to make it three Associated Press national championships in a row since the poll was introduced in 1936.

“No offense to the Minnesota 1935 team, but I don’t know if it’s going to resonate with my audience,” Smart glibly offered. “I don’t care about the three-peat, the two-peat or the one-peat. I care about complacency. We address complacency by the people we bring into our organization. Once you do that, you don’t have complacency because you have the right hard-wiring.”

The Bulldogs are hard-wired for success. Smart has solid faith in the recruiting philosophy he’s brought with him from his days as Alabama’s defensive coordinator under Nick Saban.

And he believes his tenet of seeking quality recruits who love football and are selfless individuals will carry Georgia forward with an excellent chance of winning three straight College Football Playoff titles.

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The spoils of success

It wasn’t all a celebration in the offseason, however. It was very bittersweet with the tragic death of a Georgia player and a team staff member in a reckless driving accident tied to racing, and a raft of other traffic violations, at least 10 since Jan. 15. An ESPN report chronicled more than 60 moving violations that included speeding and reckless and distracted driving since the start of the 2021 school year. Thirty occurred in the past 12 months.

“I'm disappointed anytime we have traffic incidents,” Smart said. “We actually don't have more now than we've had in the past. What concerns me most is the safety of our players, and when you drive at high speeds, it's unsafe. 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.”

He might more easily eradicate a lot of the problems with harsh game suspensions and even dismissals, but Smart hasn’t seemed inclined to follow that course. Winning on such a big stage always elevates a program’s profile and at times shines a bright light on its excesses as well as successes.

The latter have gotten the lion’s share of he exposure, but Georgia hasn’t seemed to handle it all that well. His demand for accountability will certainly draw attention moving forward, but on the field it’s been full speed ahead.

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Smart might have more in common with those Bernie Bierman Gophers teams than he thinks because both head coaches leaned heavily on power football and strong defenses.

However, Smart’s unlikely to turn to the single wing or rely on the Minnesota coach’s conservative stance of choosing the wind on 28 of the 35 times he won the opening coin toss.

He might tend to be a bit less aggressive this fall with the emergence of a new quarterback to replace two-time title game MVP Stetson Bennett and offensive coordinator Todd Monken. Sophomore Carson Beck’s yet to throw an interception in his seven games of action in mop-up duty, and Mike Bobo might well emphasize the run game behind what could be the strongest offensive line in the nation.

Smart does have the security blanket of junior Brock Bowers, the best tight end in college football, and Georgia will almost certainly start the season as the nation’s top-ranked team.

Bowers ranks Smart as “an elite motivator” and said there’s not a single day that his head coach doesn’t bring “max energy.” The same could be said of the shy, soft-spoken Bowers, who will probably be the face of the SEC but certainly not the voice of the league.

He’s as big a reason as any Bulldog why Georgia has replaced Alabama as the reigning dynasty of college football. It’s won 33 of its last 34 games and had a perfect 15-0 mark last season. The Dawgs have won eight of their last 10 bowl games, not including a certain Sugar Bowl game in 2018.

“I have a ton of respect for Alabama,” Bowers said. “We have a great core group of leaders on our team.”

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All signs pointing to a three-peat

Georgia’s also got one of the easiest schedules of the CFP contenders. The Bulldogs have scheduled the likes of Oregon, Clemson and Notre Dame the last three non-COVID seasons. But this year’s slate is peppered with relative roadkill such as Tennessee-Martin, Ball State, UAB and Georgia Tech and does not include dates with Alabama, LSU or Texas A&M.

The Bulldogs open with four straight home games and have only three true SEC road games, one of which is at lowly Vanderbilt. CBS Sports ranked their schedule as the easiest in the conference.

Asked what he’d say to critics who suggest his schedule is a cakewalk, Smart bristled a bit and said, “Come play it. I’d invite anybody to come into the SEC and play it.”

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In seven seasons, Smart’s already established himself as one of the elite head coaches in the game and shows every sign of pushing Saban aside. Granted, Smart’s 81 wins (against only 15 losses) pale against Saban’s 285 victories, but the head Dawg has won two titles — one at Alabama’s expense — and very nearly a third in the last six years, had Tua Tagovailoa not come to the second-half rescue for Bama. Saban won three in his first six years at Tuscaloosa and now has seven total, six of them with the Crimson Tide.

The repeat in 2011 and 2012 marked the only time Saban has won back-to-back titles and came when Smart was his defensive coordinator, but Smart said that has no relevance to today. But he’s not unaware of the significance attached to the recent run and isn't opposed to bringing up the pair of three-peats by Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

“We've certainly looked at some three-peat scenarios of teams like the Bulls and different sports teams that they might actually know about,” Smart said of his players.

Most would not characterize the upcoming season as anything remotely approaching a last dance for Georgia because few teams are recruiting — and retaining — talent as well as he has. Smart made a note of saying that of the 20 high school players he signed in the pandemic class, when recruits couldn’t take official visits to campuses, 17 remain with the program.

For six weeks in the offseason, the staff introduced a deep-dive study of the New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team, which won three World Cups and more than 76% of its matches, to better equip his Bulldogs team for the challenges ahead.

“One of their mantras was ‘Better never rests,’“ Smart said. “We believe that. Those are strong words when you think about it. Better never rests.”

Of course, neither do the best.

Covering SEC media days

All 14 schools are participating in the annual SEC media days this week in Nashville, Tenn. Follow the weeklong coverage of American-Statesman staffers Kirk Bohls and Thomas Jones on hookem.com.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Georgia bids for a third consecutive national title with strong team