No pressure, but 2017 is make or break for Kirby Smart

“Year 1 was disappointing. Any time you finish 8-5 it’s a disappointment at the University of Georgia. Certainly not the standard I expect to keep.”

-          Kirby Smart

For the past 10 years, there is an unfortunate tradition that has been observed in Athens, Georgia. During the summer, expectations and hope abound and by December, gloom and disappointment ruin Christmas.

Last year was a disappointment, and if you don’t believe me, just ask Kirby Smart. You might think it is a little crazy to say this, but year 2 might just be make or break for Kirby at Georgia. No, I’m not one of the crazy people that will calling for Kirby’s job if Georgia goes 8-5 again in 2017, but if Kirby Smart is going to achieve the success that he, and Georgia fans, expect him to achieve, we will probably see something special in Athens this fall.

What do Vince Dooley, Mark Richt, Nick Saban, Steve Spurrier, Pete Carroll, and Bob Stoops all have in common? Well, Georgia fans know all too well that it isn’t a National Title, even though Richt is the only person on that list without a national championship ring. No, the thing all those coaches have in common is that they became the coach you know them to be in year two at the school.

You see, year one is difficult. Just think about it from a human standpoint. You have to move, you have to find schools for your kids, you have to hire a staff, you have to find someone to cut your hair, you have to go around to every booster club meeting in your state, and some out of state, selling yourself to the fan base. There is a lot of crap to do in year one, and none of that even includes what you have to do on the field.

On the field you have to figure out a spring and fall practice schedule. You have to organize the practices themselves. You have to plan pre-game meals, meeting times, finalize playbooks, decide on a pre-game warm up routine, organize your sideline and substitution packages, oh yeah, and you have to figure out how to be a head football coach.

So I think we can all understand that year one requires a lot of work before you kickoff and a lot of learning once you have kicked off. But what you may not realize is that some of the best coaches of the past 20 years struggled in their first year. Here are just a few examples.

Pete Carroll went 6-6 in his first season at USC in 2001 and was 5-3 in the Pac 10.

Bob Stoops went 7-5 at Oklahoma in 1999 and was 5-3 in the Big 12.

Even the greatest coach in the history of sports (sarcasm), Nick Saban went 7-6 at Alabama in 2007, and only went 4-4 in the SEC. This was after he had already been a head coach at Michigan State and LSU.

Spurrier had a solid 9-2 season at Florida in 1990 and went 6-1 in the SEC, but again, he had experience at Duke before he took the Florida job.

Now, bringing it closer to home, Richt was 8-4 at Georgia in 2001 and 5-3 in the SEC. Richt lost to 

Florida and Auburn in his first season. Richt lost the Auburn game himself with awful clock management and gave away the Music City Bowl to Boston College by punting late in the game without enough timeouts to get the ball back.

In 1965, Vince Dooley went 7-3-1 in his first season at Georgia and was only 3-2 in the SEC.

So I think it is safe to say that a disappointing first season isn’t the end of the world, but when you look at what those coaches did in their second season, it raises the stakes for Georgia in 2017.

Pete Carroll led USC to be Pac 10 Co-Champions and won the Orange Bowl.

Bob Stoops went undefeated and beat Florida State for the National Title in 2001. Mark Richt was 

FSU’s offensive coordinator in that game, and FSU failed to score a point on offense.

Nick Saban went 12-2 in his second season at Alabama, but the Tide were 12-0 and ranked #1 in the nation before losing a close SEC title game to Florida and then losing the Sugar Bowl to Utah in a game they didn’t care about.

Steve Spurrier went 10-2 in 1991, won the SEC but lost the Sugar Bowl and a possible national title to Notre Dame.

Richt, of course, went 13-1 in 2002, won the SEC and beat his mentor, Bobby Bowden in the Sugar Bowl.

Dooley went 10-1 in 1966. Georgia shared the SEC title and won the Cotton Bowl.

Even Gene Chizik, who went 8-5 in his first season at Auburn, went undefeated in his second season and won the National Title with the best player money could buy, Cam Newton.

So, this summer, just like every summer, Georgia fans will count down the days until kickoff with anticipation of a return to Glory, Glory for Old Georgia. But this year we might just feel differently come Christmas Day.

If Kirby Smart is going to be the man to finally get Georgia to the top of the highest mountain in college football, then 2017 will most likely be the year we point to as the first and biggest step of that journey.

Glory, Glory

73 days until kickoff against App State

Go Dawgs

Athens, We Have a Problem

When I was in elementary school, my mother would tell me that I was handsome. I was very overweight, I had the worst pair of eye glasses ever made, and apparently my mother was the only girl on the face of the earth who thought I was handsome. The thing was, I wanted to believe her. By the time I got to high school, I realized that my looks weren’t going to take me very far, but that my overwhelming wit and charm would have to be my ticket. Thus, I write this blog very infrequently.

The old saying goes that the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have one.

No, I haven’t decided to start writing about my personal thoughts on life, because I am sure that would chase away both of the non-family members that read this.

Georgia football has a problem, and we need to be honest about it for a couple of reasons. First, I desperately want to enjoy the upcoming football season. Without proper expectations, enjoying your favorite team is impossible. If you cheer for Vanderbilt, then you can’t expect to win a national title, or else you are just setting yourself up for certain failure.

Second, without recognizing the reality of where the program is, and quite frankly, where the program has been, we won’t be able to truly appreciate where the program goes next.

Finally, without recognizing the mistakes of the past few seasons, we as a fan base, are doomed to repeat those mistakes again in 2017.

Ok, so I have laid the foundation, maybe even made you laugh a little with that first paragraph, and now is the time where I have to make you a little, or maybe more than a little sad.

The reality of the Georgia football is this: Georgia is not and has not been one of the top ten programs in America.

Doesn’t it feel nice to say it out loud. It is like a weight has been lifted. Go ahead, read that last sentence again and just feel your anxiety both melt away and build up again like the sound of an oncoming freight train.

A year and a half ago, when Georgia decided to fire Mark Richt, I wrote on this blog that Georgia didn’t have to settle for an unproven assistant coach like Kirby Smart. My argument was that Georgia was not the kind of program that had to take a chance on a guy who had never been a successful head coach before.

Not many people responded to that line of thinking, most notably, Greg McGarity, Georgia’s Athletic Director who hired Smart about four days after I wrote that blog.

There is a reason that Georgia didn’t go out and hire a proven head coach, and it is because Georgia isn’t the type of program in 2016/2017 that a proven winner is going to leave his current job for. 

Don’t you think Georgia would have liked to hire Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Dabo Swinney, Mark Dantonio, Chip Kelley, or Bob Stoops? Of course they would have. Those guys have been successful head college football coaches.

Think about it this way, if you are an athlete who tears his ACL, do you want to go to Dr. James Andrews who has repaired the torn ligaments of every major athlete in the past 20 years, or do you want to go to someone who just graduated medical school but has the chance to really make something out of himself?

You go to James Andrews, of course.

My point isn’t to knock Kirby Smart, only to illustrate the point, that outside of the state of Georgia and the Bulldog Nation, Georgia isn’t thought of in the same way as the elite programs in the country.

So why do we think differently? The answer is very simple. There was a brief time when we were one of the best programs in that nation.

From 2002 to 2007, Georgia’s winning percentage was tied for 6^th best in the nation. During that time, Georgia had two SEC titles, one more SEC title game appearance, and 3 BCS Bowl game appearances. Additionally, if you count players on the 2007 team, there were 5 first round draft picks that played for Georgia during that time period, including the number 1 overall pick in Matthew Stafford.

Georgia was on fire as a program and everything was looking up.

But then everything changed, and the program went back to where it had been in the five seasons before 2002, a solid Top 25 team, but not a national power.

I have said many times that the turning point for the program was the 2008 “Backout” game against Alabama, and I stand by that. I also believe that no program in America, other than LSU, has suffered more at the hands of Alabama’s dominance than Georgia.

Alabama has taken players from Georgia any time they want, and the level of talent at Georgia hasn’t been the same since Saban got to Alabama.

When you run the numbers from 2008-20016, Georgia ranks 18^th in winning percentage among FBS schools.

18^th.

We aren’t a Top 10 program.

Here are some stats that make it worse.

Of the Top 30 teams by winning percentage since 2008, Georgia is one of only four teams who hasn’t won or played for a national title, played in the college football playoff, or even played in one of the old BCS, or one of the new New Year’s 6 bowl games. The other three teams? Nebraska, BYU, and Navy.

While teams like Auburn and Texas fall behind Georgia in the win percentage rankings, they have both played for, and Auburn has won a National title in the last 9 seasons.

Want to hear some of the schools behind Georgia in winning percentage from 2008-2016 that have accomplished one or more of those feats? Well I’m going to tell you anyway.

Houston, Cincinnati, Iowa, West Virginia, Northern Illinois, and Washington.

Read that list again.

One more time, please.

That is where Georgia football is in 2017.

I am, as you may know if you have read this blog before, an eternal optimist. I have always seen the glass as all the way full, even when Georgia’s team couldn’t hit water if it fell out of a boat. Because of that, I believe with all my heart that Georgia is on the right path with Kirby Smart.

Recruiting has improved. Facilities have improved. Energy in the fan base has improved.

But, until we start winning big games consistently, we are what we have been: middle of the road at best.

None of us know what 2017 will hold. On paper, Georgia should contend for the SEC East, but that has been the case every year since 2012, and Georgia hasn’t been back to the SEC title game. If we look back at 2017 as the turning point in the Kirby Smart era, we should know now that Kirby didn’t come aboard a rocket ship already launched, and ride it to the heavens. He came aboard a really nice boat that was stranded in the middle of the ocean for a decade.

If 2017 is another building block, let’s say a 10-3 building block including a win over Tech and a win in a bowl game, the last thing we need is the stupid people coming out of their mom’s basement saying we should fire Kirby.

Georgia isn’t Alabama. Georgia isn’t going to be Alabama by the end of 2017 or the end of 2018. There will probably never be another run like Alabama is on right now. Alabama isn’t the standard that we should be judging the program by.

We should want a National Title. That takes steps. Look at Clemson. They started going to BCS games consistently in 2013, had to get over the FSU hurdle in the ACC, lost a title game, and then got their payoff last season.

Georgia is heading in the right direction, but we should all be aware of just how high the Dawgs have to climb in order to get where we want to go.

88 Days until kickoff.

Go Dawgs.