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How did Georgia football change course and get to the top, and whats next?

ATHENS, Ga. — When Kirby Smart took over as Georgia’s coach, he looked out the window of his office and could see the construction of a long-awaited indoor facility. It was a symbol of what was to be and what Georgia had not been: a national contender or a program that knew what it took to be one.

Now Smart’s office sits in a renovated and expanded football facility. When Smart took over, Georgia had one of the smallest weight rooms in the SEC. This new facility gives it one of its biggest. Offices were also added for the quality control coaches and support staffers Smart wanted. And there are gleaming new lockers for the blue-chip players Smart wanted to recruit.

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There are more amenities in a building that cost $80 million, right after the $63 million spent to put in a recruiting room and new locker room at Sanford Stadium. Right after the $32 million to build the indoor facility.

Maybe Smart, whose contract adds up to more than $111 million, sits in that office and reflects on how much has changed. Maybe when Smart walks through the first floor of the building, he notices the black wall next to the elevator and remembers how it has been dedicated to Georgia’s national championship teams: Photos of the 1942 and 1980 teams were posted such that a perfect amount of space was left for the 2021 and 2022 photos. Below those four photos is room for four more.

“We’re built to sustain here. That’s my motto,” Smart said after this year’s spring game, a day when Stetson Bennett brandished his national championship ring while Carson Beck looked capable of replacing him.

It also was a day when a bevy of blue-chip defensive players looked ready to form the next great Georgia defense and when half of Sanford Stadium was closed off due to more construction.

Kirby Smart’s Georgia team will try to win the program’s third straight national title this fall. (Brett Davis / USA Today)

Years ago, Smart seemed ready to stay at his alma mater as long as it kept building things, and Georgia has not stopped building things. Georgia also is letting him keep his best assistants, giving defensive line coach Tray Scott a second offseason raise, up to $1 million, to keep him from going to LSU. Imagine a position coach hitting the seven-figure mark under Mark Richt.

This is now the top job in the country. But it wasn’t a few years ago. Not with the state of its facilities. Not with the financial commitment, or lack thereof, by the administration. The passion was always there. But it took the administration finally buying in, literally, to what it needed to do to win. It took seeing what Alabama, LSU and other programs in the SEC were doing.

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And then it took Richt, a good coach reluctant to always engage in the cutthroat ways of modern college athletics, to be replaced by Smart, who had seen how it had been done at Alabama. Smart was preceded by two coaches — Richt and Jim Donnan — who are now in the College Football Hall of Fame. But neither of them won on Smart’s level, a sign of Smart’s abilities and what changed in the mid-2010s: Georgia saw the error of its previous penny-pinching ways.

“If you look back, there were a number of years where nothing was happening facility-wise. And we fell behind,” said Jon Stinchcomb, a member of the UGA Athletic Board since 2015 and a former Georgia and NFL offensive lineman. “Now there’s a much more forward-thinking approach of, ‘Where do we compare now in what we offer and what do we need to do in future years?’ And that forward thinking is in conjunction with what Kirby brought to the table. But it’s part of a much bigger approach across the athletic department. …

“I don’t think it’s a secondary relationship between invested dollars and overall success. I think for a number of years we were in that realm where we were just good enough to not be good enough. Now that certainly has changed.”

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How much has it changed? In January, recruits participating in the All-American Bowl in San Antonio were asked by 247Sports to name the school with the best facilities, and Georgia got the most votes.

And while Georgia spends a lot of money on recruiting — technically the most in the country, according to a USA Today study — that figure is slightly misleading: UGA sold its school plane years ago, so Smart and his coaches are using rented and leased jets. But it is correct to say Georgia is spending a lot of money to fly its coaches around the country to recruit.

These were all areas on the table when Jimmy Sexton, Smart’s agent, sat down with Georgia officials to hammer out a deal to replace Richt in December 2015. But now another area not on the radar back then is front-facing: NIL.

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Based on how recruiting has gone during the past couple of years, Smart’s program isn’t falling behind in that department. Georgia and its collective, the Classic City Collective, have so far managed to avoid any public issues a la Florida with Jaden Rashada. And as Stinchcomb pointed out, Georgia navigates this while “still maintaining nine-figure investments and facility upgrades.”

Of course, that’s where winning helps: Donations pour in, and tickets are bought by happy fans. The coffers also are set to be increased in a new SEC deal with ESPN, which could bring the annual payout to each school to between $65 million and $70 million, up from around $50 million this year.

But herein lies another challenge to Georgia’s new supremacy.

The landscape is about to change thanks to SEC expansion. The arrival of Oklahoma and Texas will mean the end of divisions. It’s hard to argue that Georgia hasn’t had an easier path the past few years in the SEC East, where Florida has been down, Tennessee was only resurgent last year and the rest of the division lacks a traditional football power. It also helped that Georgia’s permanent opponent from the SEC West, Auburn, was down. But starting the next year, the SEC will be one big competitive jumble, with Georgia playing everyone at least twice every four years. No more Vanderbilt, Missouri and South Carolina on the schedule every year. (Assuming a nine-game schedule with Florida, Auburn and Kentucky as the annual opponents.) No more dodging five of seven teams from the West every year because there will be no West, plus Oklahoma and Texas thrown in. The schedule will be more challenging, as will the path back to the SEC championship.

Luckily, this all coincides with the College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams, so everyone’s margin for error goes up a bit. As long as Smart keeps recruiting at a high level, and as long as Georgia keeps supporting him, it should remain a yearly contender.

But with winning comes more scrutiny. Smart had that brought home to him at his news conference to open spring practice. He spent the first half fielding questions about his program’s culture in the aftermath of the car crash that killed player Devin Willock and team staffer Chandler LeCroy. Perhaps at a lower-profile program, the questions wouldn’t have been raised and the incident would have been written off as a tragedy and not a scandal. Whether or not it was a scandal, the questions were a wake-up call to Smart that his program is under the tightest microscope in the country. When players are arrested — such as Jalen Carter and Jamon Dumas-Johnson for misdemeanor racing — it reflects on the program.

“There’s no lack of control for our program,” Smart said at that sometimes tense news conference on March 14. “I think our kids across the board will tell you that we have an incredible culture here. We have a connective tissue that brings our team together. Our guys do make mistakes. That’s historically probably going to happen when you are 18- to 22-year-olds. Our job as coaches is to prevent that from happening. That starts with me.”

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Some of the scrutiny is on the field. As dominant as Georgia has been, naysayers can point to little moments that could have robbed the Bulldogs of either championship:

Ohio State missing a field goal that would have won the Peach Bowl. (Albeit a 50-yarder, so it’s not like it was a chip shot.)

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• In the same game, Ohio State losing its best receiver in Marvin Harrison Jr. on a hit by Javon Bullard.

• Two seasons ago, Alabama losing its top two receivers against Georgia: John Metchie in the SEC championship, then Jameson Williams in the national championship.

Of course, anyone who has followed Georgia through the years can say that was just the college football gods evening things up. Just Google “Tyler Simmons was onsides” or the end of the 2012 SEC championship. Just as a start.

So if the market has corrected things, Georgia’s program is in a fair position to evaluate: At the top but vulnerable. Either way, Georgia has moved to the next phase: It is no longer the more sympathetic also-ran or the program accused of underperforming.

Stinchcomb was with the New Orleans Saints when they won their only Super Bowl title in 2010. He retired soon after and watched as Georgia fired the coach he graduated under, Richt, because he couldn’t get the program to the final level.

“I do think once you win a championship, the bar is raised, the expectations are higher,” Stinchcomb said. “And Georgia certainly falls under that category and was able to answer that call. And now the expectation is to maintain that same level.

“For 40 years, as a Georgia fan, you’re sitting here going: ‘When will it be our year?’ Kind of expecting sooner or later that it’s gonna happen. But now it’s an anticipation of, ‘How long can we maintain this?’ We should be vying for a national championship on an annual basis.”

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories examining the 2023 college football season’s most intriguing programs. Which teams are primed to break out? Struggling to find consistency? What’s gone right — or wrong — and what comes next?

Also in this series:

NC State football and the neverending search for the elusive ACC championship

(Graphic: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Andy Lyons, Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)

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