ATHENS — Georgia coach Kirby Smart doesn’t look back often, but he allowed himself a few moments of nostalgia during the “Virtual G-Day Game” replay of the Notre Dame game on Saturday.
“Throws like that are why @FrommJake is going to be in the NFL for a long time! #NFLDraft,” Smart tweeted out during the replay on the SEC Network.
Fromm was an efficient 20-of-26 passing for 187 yards and a touchdown, and he had 15 yards on two carries in the 23-17 win over the Irish last Sept. 21.
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Smart trusted Fromm under center for three seasons, and the Warner Robins product came through with three SEC East Division titles, an SEC title and Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl victories.
Georgia must now move on without an experienced signal caller, and Smart shared how challenging that really is.
“If we had Jake back in this situation, you’d be thinking, ‘Man, I’m at a huge advantage,’ “ Smart said during his interview with the Georgia Bulldogs Radio Network on Saturday. “It’s just the opposite for us, because we don’t really know what we have.
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“You evaluate our quarterbacks, and you look at it and you say ‘I’ve got a guy who had a major surgery, I got a guy that just came out of high school, I’ve got a guy that’s been a No. 2 last year, Stetson, and then I have a transfer from Wake that we don’t know a lot about, as far as in our system, so we have a lot of unknowns at that positions.”
Smart has said more than once there’s a quarterback competition.
From the sounds of it, the ability to pick up the new offense will have a lot to do with who enters fall camp with an advantage when football resumes.
“I think Coach (Todd) Monken and Buster (Faulkner) is working with coach Monken, and they are putting together a good plan of installation of verbiage, terminology, we’ve got some tests we gave them,” Smart said. “We make them do a video of themselves, and say, “Go out and be quarterback, take a snap count, that’s your homework, you have to do a snap count, you have to do a cadence, you have to do a check.
“But it’s not the same … as when a 6-foot-5, 240-pound linebacker is screaming down at you, and you’ve got to throw hot, you just can’t simulate that.”
Smart said the NCAA has increased meeting time from four hours to eight hours a week, but because of exams, Georgia can’t take full advantage of it.
Smart said the amount of preparation time teams are given before the start of the season could require the Bulldogs to simplify more than they already have with new quarterbacks and a new offensive coordinator.
“You know you’ve got to be simple, and you’ve got to do what you can do,” Smart said. “If it comes a situation where our span to get ready for the season is shrunk, we’ve got to be smart.
“We can’t reinvent the wheel, we have good football players.”
But Georgia doesn’t have an experienced quarterback now that Fromm has moved on, and the more Smart talks about his quarterback situation, the less certain he sounds.
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