Kirby and The Pick

This is pretty good.

Kirby Smart talking about the pick-six that sealed the 'ship is too funny 😂 @GeorgiaFootball pic.twitter.com/XYmQJLMxoi

— SEC Network (@SECNetwork) July 20, 2022

Alliance in tatters

ACC's Jim Phillips: "ACC is in favor of an expanded college football playoff"

— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) July 20, 2022

Maybe he thinks nobody will notice.

You may not want NIL to matter…

KIRBY SMART on NIL: "We arguably had the highest-paid defensive lineman, the highest-paid tight end, and probably the highest-paid cornerback in the NIL market. I would rival anyone in the country with 95 NIL deals coming off a national championship."

— Matt DeBary (@MattDeBary) July 20, 2022

… but the coaches know it does.

***********************************************************************

UPDATE:  In more ways than one.

"Trust me. There's a lot there."

Coach Smart's response when asked to compare his players NIL deals to Coach Nick Saban's players $3 million

— Bulldawg Illustrated (@BD_illustrated) July 20, 2022

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Earn, baby, earn

Smart also discussed NIL compensation yesterday at the Texas High School Coaches Association annual convention.  He’s not happy seeing recruits receiving compensation, and I respect his reasoning for that ($$).

“I’m all for taking care of guys that have been part of the program and start and play. It’s just that it’s a reverse system right now, where the bottom coming in are getting rewarded more than maybe the top going out. And … that makes it really tough.”

Smart expressed concern about incoming freshmen already having access to significant money.

“What do you think he’s doing with that?” Smart said. “Is that actually going to make him more successful in life? Because I promise you, if you handed me $10K a month my freshman year of college, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. I believe that.”

I mean, the dude’s in the locker room every day.  If he’s not aware of the impact, who would be?

Along those lines, though, consider what he had to say about kids on the roster getting paid.

“You give a young man … $8,000 a month or $6,000 a month, you can say, ‘He deserves that.’ Well, he might deserve that if he earns it, if he goes out there and plays,” Smart said. “I’m all for taking care of guys that have been part of the program and start and play…”

To keep harmony in the locker room, Smart said he educates players on NIL and points to the NFL, in which a star quarterback makes more money than an interior offensive lineman. He said players understand why Alabama quarterback Bryce Young can make millions in endorsements while some of his teammates might not.

According to Smart, there are currently 85 players on Georgia’s roster receiving some sort of NIL compensation.  It sounds like he’s built the kind of culture allowing the team to handle that.  When you think about it, his continued success on the recruiting trail, considering his misgivings about promising compensation to recruits, suggests that as well.

It always comes back to Jax.

It was natural to expect the usual hot takes from Kirby Smart’s comment yesterday about how exhausting coping with COVID during the 2020 season was, especially in light of how easy it was for many to misunderstand the context in which it was delivered — soon to be repeated on the recruiting trail, no doubt.

But there are the usual hot takes, and then there’s Mike Griffith’s usual hot take.  Griffith managed to use Smart’s comment as a jumping off point for… well, you can probably guess.

Coaches are not only spending time recruiting new players, but they must now also work to maintain the players already on the roster after one-time transfer legislation was passed last summer.

To boot, UGA administration has put Smart at a disadvantage with Georgia playing its designated home game with Florida in Jacksonville every other season, giving him one less opportunity than every other SEC program to host the top players in the nation in their home state.

Even if UGA could bring recruits to the Jacksonville game, they would not see the Georgia campus or have time to spend with Smart and his coaching staff and players because Athens is 340 miles away — while Gainesville sits just 70 miles from Jacksonville.

Smart, who was part of the rivalry as an All-SEC safety at Georgia, has expressed his feelings on the disadvantages of losing a home game from Sanford Stadium.

“All I ever say is that the home atmosphere we have is incredible, and the ability to bring recruits in is big,” Smart said last October on a Zoom call, asked his thoughts on the Georgia-Florida game being played in Jacksonville.

“I stand by the fact that we miss opportunities and everyone else in the country doesn’t.”

More recently, Tennessee head coach and Georgia defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt recently put the Jacksonville issue into perspective.

This could be the final season UGA plays its designated home game with Florida away from Sanford Stadium if the contract is not extended.

My Gawd.  I would use my “hammer, meet nail” analogy here, except I think hammers are less monomaniacal than Griffith when it comes to the Cocktail Party.  Seriously, brother, give it a rest.

Nick Saban wants to do it for the fans.

Strengthen the regular season schedule, that is.

Nick Saban wants a formula in CFB similar to what RPI does in college hoops to properly rate teams pic.twitter.com/jm5d7k08HL

— Josh Pate (@LateKickJosh) July 19, 2022

Nothing I can argue with there, although it’s at least a little bit interesting he only talks about that in the context of bowl games and not the CFP.

Also, yeah, a ten-game conference schedule would be fantastic, but maybe we should wait and see if we’re getting a nine-game schedule first, Coach.

NILly, NILly

Texas Tech’s non-profit NIL collective is going to pay 100 TTU football players $25k each this season.

They’ll be required to do charity work in return for the money.

Not sure how this will pass scrutiny from the IRS when audited. https://t.co/f0ILFo0ywU

— Mit Winter (@WinterSportsLaw) July 18, 2022

Sure, the government may step in to rein in collectives like the schools hope, but who saw it being the IRS instead of Congress?

Mike Leach has some thoughts about conference expansion

And I’m okay with them.

With Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC in two years, questions have circled regarding how the conference will restructure itself.

Mississippi State football coach Mike Leach — who spent a decade in the Big 12 with Texas Tech and eight seasons in the Pac-12 with Washington State — believes he has the answer.

“They oughta let me handle that,” Leach said Tuesday before taking the main stage at SEC Media Days. “I’ll have that done by lunch. I think it would be brilliant to let me handle it.”

Leach joked there are about 500 configurations for how things will pan out, but a simple one would be keeping the East vs West structure.

Alabama and Auburn would shift to the SEC East while Oklahoma and Texas would join Mississippi State in the SEC West.

“You knock those guys off and send them to the East and we have to play Texas and OU, tell me how I’ve lost on that deal,” Leach said. “I have a lot of respect for those guys, but in this conference they can just go ahead and get in line with everybody else.”

Really, combine that with a nine-game conference schedule and you’ve got a fairly non-complicated solution.  Leach wasn’t done, though.

Leach said he has no issue with the two schools joining the SEC but believes the definitions a conference and league are being clouded. The growing conferences create concern of when cross-divisional teams would face off, which is already an issue to Leach.

Mississippi State hasn’t faced Florida since 2018 and the next matchup is in 2025.

“It’s a little bulky,” Leach said. “If it’s just a conference, everybody plays everybody quite a bit. Ten to 12 is what you’re after, but I don’t think it’s realistic to play more than 16 games or too many more.”

That’s the sound a coach coming from a conference with a round robin schedule makes.  He’s right, but there’s no way that works in the New SEC.

Today, in always be ‘crootin’

That may be Kirby’s motto, but Nick’s right there with him, or maybe even past him, when it comes to selective puffery.

At this event last year in Hoover, Ala., Alabama’s Nick Saban raised eyebrows when he casually mentioned that at least one of his players had inked an NIL deal approaching $1 million. The Crimson Tide’s legendary coach offered some numbers again Tuesday at SEC Media Days.

Unsolicited, Saban mentioned that Alabama players have garnered name, image and likeness deals totaling more than $3 million. He proudly proclaimed that as “better than anybody in the country.”

Yeah?  And exactly how does he know that?  Did he survey his peers at the 130 other programs to find out?

I guess we’ll all have to take his word.

What’s happened to the Georgia Way we’ve all known and loved?

This is not a tale from your daddy’s Butts-Mehre, that’s for sure.

When Kirby Smart went to University of Georgia officials to tell them he was speaking at the Texas High School Coaches Association’s annual convention, they asked who was spending money on the plane to fly him there and back. When Smart responded, “we are,” officials asked him: “Why are we paying for it if they asked you to come speak?”

“I said, ‘Because it’s the state of Texas and we want to be able to recruit their players,” Smart said Tuesday. “I don’t care what it costs to fly there and back. We’re going.”

Turns out, the cost was $35,000 but Smart made it to Texas to headline the THSCA’s annual convention.

It’s hard to imagine something like that happening ten years ago.  And by “hard to imagine”, I mean “impossible”.  Times have definitely changed.