Lane Kiffin, that guy who was the Ole Miss football coach Sunday morning and the LSU football coach Sunday night, can evoke memories of Steve Spurrier when it comes to his visor-wearing and his verbal digs at the opposition.
Yet the new Steve Spurrier of the Southeastern Conference championship game is Georgia’s Kirby Smart.
When the league added Arkansas and South Carolina to form a 12-team collection in 1992, two six-team divisions and a conference title contest were born. Spurrier’s Florida Gators represented the Eastern Division in the first five seasons and won the league crown in four of those years, but no SEC coach since — not even Alabama’s Nick Saban — had made five consecutive appearances in the league championship game until now with Smart.
Georgia won the last three East titles from 2021-23 and has since finished among the top two teams in the post-divisional era, with the Bulldogs (11-1) set to meet Alabama (10-2) in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium this Saturday (4 p.m. on ABC).
“It’s a credit to having a really good administration, a really supportive athletic department and some incredible players,” Smart said Sunday afternoon on a conference call. “We’re very demanding of the players in our program. A lot of those guys who played in the last four games are playing in the National Football League, and they earned that right. They bought into what we preached and what we sold.