Kirby Smart isn't the first University of Georgia football coach to experience significantly more success in his second season compared to his debut year.
He's simply the latest.
Smart's Bulldogs were embarrassed at Ole Miss last season and sustained a home loss to Vanderbilt en route to the Liberty Bowl, but this year's team is 7-0 and No. 3 in the country heading into its Oct. 28 rivalry showdown with Florida in Jacksonville. Smart experienced a dramatic improvement as a Georgia safety under Jim Donnan, who doubled his win total from a 5-6 debut in 1996 to a 10-2 second season that included a 37-17 upset of Steve Spurrier's Gators and a 33-6 drubbing of Wisconsin in the Outback Bowl.
While the Southeastern Conference does have examples of coaches who have produced instant success, most notably Terry Bowden (1993) and Gus Malzahn (2013) at Auburn, it has typically taken Georgia a year to adjust.
"Sometimes it takes a little while to get meshed with the players," Donnan said. "It's just like a divorce, because you're taking over someone else's kids that weren't yours, and there are going to be different types of situations to try and work through."
Georgia's recent transition was different because Smart wasn't hired off of Nick Saban's Alabama staff to take over a flailing program. The Bulldogs went 145-51 in 15 seasons under predecessor Mark Richt, with five appearances in the SEC championship game and two league titles. The last of those titles was won in 2005, however, and Richt's 5-10 record against Florida didn't help his standing.
Smart was Richt's running backs coach in 2005, but he wanted his own imprint on his alma mater.
"I was not concerned with the way it was before," Smart said in a recent news conference. "I was only concerned with how I saw it being. I thought that was important. It was nothing about before, because I wasn't here. It was more about how I felt practices should be done. From a depth standpoint, you have to have good numbers to be able to practice things that you want to practice.
"We had to work to get toward that, and we're still striving to get what we need from a scout-team standpoint, a repetition standpoint and a physicality standpoint. We're trying to improve that every day."
Smart's first SEC game as a head coach was a 28-27 win at Missouri. His second was a 45-14 loss at Ole Miss, a game in which the Bulldogs trailed 45-0.
This season, Georgia is 4-0 in league games, with the average score 43-11.
"Kirby played last year with a freshman quarterback behind an offensive line that struggled in some games," Donnan said. "This year, he's got another freshman quarterback, but he's got a better defense. You take advantage of what you're given."
Smart said the "practice habit and culture change" has been good for his players, and the overall roster retention hasn't hurt either. In last Saturday's 53-28 win over Missouri inside Sanford Stadium, 13 of Georgia's 22 starters were Richt signees.
Richt went 8-4 in his first season at Georgia in 2001, and his second year yielded a 13-1 record that resulted in the program's first SEC title in 20 years. Should Smart up his win total from eight to 13 as well, that would assuredly mean the Bulldogs would fit somewhere in college football's four-team playoff.
It's not improbable for Richt's No. 8 Miami Hurricanes (5-0, 3-0 Atlantic Coast Conference) to make a run at the playoff as well, with Richt turning in another second-year success story in his second locale, which is also his alma mater.
"Mark has done a tremendous job," Smart said. "I actually got to see some of the Miami-Georgia Tech game, because we watched Tech some this week. They've beaten Tech two years in a row now, so I think Coach Richt has a rejuvenated energy and has done a good job down there.
"They're playing really hard and recruiting well. He's always done a tremendous job.''
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.