Judging from the continuing comments about increased situational work in spring practice, it’s area of major emphasis for Smart now.
Georgia begins every team meeting this spring with a different situation. Smart talked to NFL coaches this offseason, which he says deal with tight games even more than Georgia did.
“Every single day, except the first practice, we had end-of-game situation at practice.,” Smart said. “I think it makes Jacob (Eason) a lot better. It makes Jake Fromm a lot better. And defensively, it’s been great. We even had a situation the other day where we were gonna clock the ball, We had a first down and we went to spike the ball and the guy jumped offsides. At the end of game, we had a 10-second runoff.”
This, quite frankly, is what you want to hear from someone coming off his first year as a head coach with a few rough game management moments. Repetition and familiarity lead to improvement, hopefully.
It’s no different than what we wanted to see out of Richt early on in his career, too. The problem there was that he’d seem to fix one problem, only to let another one develop. The trick isn’t just learning from your mistakes; it’s making sure that you avoid a one step forward, one step back management style. Kirby is big on focus, so maybe he can dodge the trap that eventually brought down his predecessor.
Get The Picture 
I’m still in the optimism phase on Kirby. Of course, this year will tell me a lot about whether or not that is warranted.
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I bought into the “Kirby is big on focus” last year. I believed we were getting “The Process” with a dose of compassion. Problem is, we never saw that. If anything, what we saw was a head coach hyper focused on things that shouldn’t have been a high priority for him and a whole lot of very typical first year head coaching blunders. In short, a guy who didn’t know how to be a head coach yet. Although that’s to be expected, we were promised it wouldn’t be the case with Kirby and because we’re Georgia fans we believed it. Or at least I did. You know the old saying, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So this year, I’ll believe it when I see it. We all know at this time of year everybody has a “new attitude” and all the guys are “buying in.” Seniors are “stepping up” to lead the team and everybody is “excited about the voluntary workouts.” The vibe in the weight room is “electric” and nobody has seen anything like it “in the four years that I’ve been here.” Until I see something on the field, this is just more off season happy talk.
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One situation I’d like them to work on every practice and in the film room is walking into the stadium in Jax and kicking the sh*t out of the gators.
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Right on brother
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Word.
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Other than stretching isn’t everything done in practice a “situation” in a game?
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POSITIVE POST ALERT!
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Until I see us successfully defend a few more Hail Marys, I will remain terrified of the Tennessee “situation” repeating itself.
Have we finally learned that the three-man rush is not a great idea when the other team needs a miracle play?
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With one of the teams best pass rushers playing safety.
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You nailed it Senator.
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Richt had some big last-second wins but I am not sure I have gotten over this call at the end – http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2001/11/15/uga_326848.shtml#.WPouFlP1BBw
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Agree, for all the unjustified clock/game management criticism Richt received, this example was truly a horrible decision that had no justification. I remember my jaw hitting my chest as it hit me that the game was actually lost. Coaches rarely lose games, and we would still have won if we had gotten the ball in the end zone on that one play, but missing out on having two chances was his biggest mistake, and I consider that the one game where coaching cost us a game.
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Am I the only guy who doesn’t like the 10 second run-off rule? It was designed to keep people from purposely committing a penalty to stop the clock when out of TOs but it really is a way for an innocent mistake (like jumping off sides on an end of game winning FG) to cause a team to lose the game. We need to change that rule.
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It’s a terrible rule, but the idea of committing a penalty to get a stoppage of play when you have no timeouts is pretty awful as well.
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Fine. Then enhance the penalty like they do in the NBA for an intentional foul. Tack on 15 yards for Unsportmanlike Conduct if the officials decide the foul was on purpose. But don’t run all the clock off and end the game prematurely. IMHO too many games are being decided by game officials’ actions. This is one of the worst examples.
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Agree – the question is how to determine a penalty was intentional. An intentional and flagrant foul in basketball is pretty easy to see. An intentional false start isn’t. I don’t like the run-off, but I don’t see a fair outcome for this issue. No one wants the game to end on a penalty, and no one wants to see a team take advantage of the timing rules to get an unwarranted extra play to win or tie a game. I guess I would lean toward allowing the players to decide the outcome rather than the officials. The only things you could do is to start the clock as soon as the ball is marked for play and make any penalty on the offense include a loss of down in the last 10 seconds.
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You are right on with this Mayor, no justification for time penalties. It is terrible to watch helplessly as your last chance for victory ticks off the clock because of an official’s decision.
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The old finger in the leaking dam metaphor. With at least 80% of the defense leaving after this year it’s probably safe to assume that defensive inexperience will be the next leak in the dam in 2018. Getting kids that will be relied upon next year meaningful snaps this year is the obvious fix. The only problem is that they have to make sure that the substantial leak last season has been plugged… hopefully tomorrow gives some indication.
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Seems Kirby should hire a staffer that can keep him informed via the headset of what to do now based on somebody’s best seller. I know that some media type has written a book on how to handle every possible F up. They sure know what to do after the fact. The AD chose to hire another HC in training and I hope Kirby does as well as the last one but the joke about Mark was he was in his 15th year of OJT. Even Saban allowed Lane to throw the ball against tOSU when they were running it down their throats and basically lost the NC. Sh*t happens.
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