Welcome to talking season. SEC Media Days is underway in Tampa, where 16 head coaches, dozens of players and roughly 1,000 media members will spend the next four days discussing everything from championship expectations to quarterback battles and College Football Playoff expansion. We’ll update this tracker throughout the week with the biggest news, notable quotes and key takeaways from every coach who steps to the podium.
Kirby Smart, Georgia
The longest tenured coach in the SEC started the day on Tuesday. Kirby Smart’s annual address to the media was a copy and paste from previous seasons and just as enjoyable as ever.
He brought up the offseason, his admiration for Greg Sankey and praised other successes from the UGA athletic department. He even updated this year’s team motto, which he adapted from the OKC Thunder about “being uncommon.”
One media member called Georgia’s wide receiver room the team’s biggest question mark. Smart smiled and replied, “I appreciate people like you in the media continuing to question them.”
He also brought up one of the things that Georgia has done better than almost anyone in the country over the last several years: continuity. Not only has Georgia done a better job at player retention than any other team in the country, but the continuity on staff, especially in this era, has been elite.
Smart pointed out that they’ve had almost the exact same staff for the last three to four years across the board. They even have four coaches on staff that have been with Smart for nine or more years.
What stood out the most was his reminder to everyone about who Georgia is, and always will be, despite the constant changes around him. When asked about the ever-changing landscape of college football he said plain and simply that a lot has changed but “what wins football games has not changed.”
