Compare this blast from the past from Collin Barber…
“We have coach (John) Lilly who does Pride — the punt team — but it would be nice to have …a guy that knows about punting and kicking and not just coverage in what we’re doing,” said Barber, who still at times turns to personal kicking coach Marc Nolan in Roswell. “It would be great to have a specific coach to do the basic drills of kicking and punting.”
… with Coach Smart’s comments yesterday about Kevin Butler’s work:
“I think it’s the greatest asset a first-year coach could have, especially with somebody like me who really has not dealt on the psychological side of kickers. Who better to have than one of the greatest ever to kick in the game.”
By itself, that may not be much, but to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, a detail here, a detail there, pretty soon you’re talking real improvement.
Get The Picture 
I hope Kevin can make our kickers great again.
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Well, that would be Uuuge.
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And bigly.
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He has to built a wall around their heads to increase concentration.
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I want our kicker to be so great, that I get tired of their greatness!
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It takes a village to raise a kicker.
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I’ll take incremental improvement over incremental entropy, every day of the week.
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CMR & Kirby are both open about their coaching weaknesses. The former let his clock management, roster management, etc. weaknesses fester – even after saying publicly he’d work on those problems. The latter takes proactive steps to avoid letting them hurt the team. The biggest reason I’m optimistic about this season and beyond.
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This take seems premature, given we know very little about the results CKS the head coach will have. But familiarity breeds contempt, I guess. Give Smart 15 years and I wonder if we’ll find something to grouse about.
Everybody has X hours in a day and must choose to concentrate on some things more than others. We’ll surely find areas that CMR handled better than CKS.
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I could have sworn Richt sought out a clock-management expert after his first season (and even cited the end of the ’01 Auburn game as to why).
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He did. He consulted with Homer Smith.
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And that Auburn loss was the biggest, maybe only, mistake he made at the end of the game with clock management. I would add the loss to Michigan State in OT regarding the FG as another but that was not a clock management issue.
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Calling a timeout at the end of the tech game two years ago when their kicking team was struggling to get on the field to attempt a 50 plus yarder (that he ended up making after the timeout, his career long by the way) was pretty bad…
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I wouldn’t argue that, but rarely does anyone even bring that up, they all focus on the kickoff (which was what a majority of coaches I see do at all levels.) That was not a mistake, but the timeout looks to have saved GT. That wasn’t clock management, imo, it was a stupid attempt to ice the kicker, or to tell our guys to not get a penalty…never heard an explanation.
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Having Butler is a great move. That being said, I don’t think anyone is going to help what they have to work with this year. I really hope we can punch the ball in because it sounds like we will be in 4 down territory until we get inside the 20!
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