Kirby Smart won four college football national championships as Alabama’s defensive coordinator under Nick Saban and has one of his own as Georgia’s head coach.
Smart is now hitting the reset button, which he appears to be doing in the same emphatic fashion as his former mentor. The Bulldogs practiced Tuesday afternoon for the first time since their 33-18 downing of Saban’s Crimson Tide on Jan. 10 in Indianapolis, which earned Georgia its first national championship since 1980.
“We’ve put that to the side and are not communicating or talking about that,” Smart said Tuesday in a news conference. “That’s something they’ll be able to have for the rest of their lives, but you don’t defend a title even though you guys want it to be that way. That’s not what we do. We start fresh, just like we did when we lost to Texas in a bowl game.
“We start completely new, and I think that’s so hard for the media to grasp. It’s not hard for us, because we go into a different part of the program, which is the offseason conditioning. We certainly have different faces and different people in places, but they’re right where they need to be.”
Georgia will practice every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday until conducting its G-Day spring game on April 16 (1 p.m. on ESPN2).