That one time Georgia football coach Kirby Smart went to rivalry game with Gators as a fan
Kirby Smart will be on the sideline for his eighth time as head coach for a Georgia-Florida game Saturday in Jacksonville.
He played in the game as a Georgia football safety in the 1990s
He even saw the game from an entirely different perspective, not as a kid growing up in south Georgia, but while he was an NFL assistant in 2006.
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Smart watched from the stands as part of a crowd of 84,572. Florida beat Georgia and freshman quarterback Matthew Stafford 21-14.
“It was different, I’ll just say that,” Smart said Thursday night on the “Bulldogs Live” radio show. “I realized a lot of the people around me didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I swore I’d never go back.”
Smart went 1-3 as a player against Florida, winning as a 20-point underdog against the No. 6 Gators 37-17 in 1997. He is 5-2 as a head coach and coached as an assistant as Georgia’s running backs coach in 2005.
He left to join Nick Saban’s staff with the Miami Dolphins as safeties coach.
Smart told the story after a young boy named Palmer in the show audience told the coach he was going to his first Georgia-Florida game this weekend and asked if Smart had gone before as a fan.
“I had never been to a Georgia-Florida game in my life,” Smart said. “I had been as a player, I had been as a coach and I wanted to go as a fan. I flew from Miami to Jacksonville, went to the game and I had recruited a lot of the players that had been playing for Georgia. I enjoyed it a lot. It was a really, really great atmosphere. Just be careful because there’s a lot of Gators walking around, OK."
The Dolphins had an off week after starting 1-6 en route to a 6-10 season.
Host Scott Howard asked Smart if he partook in activities in the parking lot “and all that festiveness going on out there,” in a game that became known as the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.”
Smart’s response: “That will remain unknown.”
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Kirby Smart has experienced Georgia football vs. Florida as a fan
