Kirby Smart’s Waffle House football epiphany, humble beginnings after NFL cut

ATHENS — Kirby Smart will take the stage in Nashville at SEC Media Days this week on top of the college football world, a defending two-time national championship coach with an eight-figure salary.

But Smart admits coaching wasn’t his dream growing up, and he certainly didn’t spend time considering the possibility while playing for the Bulldogs under Ray Goff and Jim Donnan.

“You’re supposed to be looking at (your future) all your life,” Smart said, “but something about sports. you don’t look at it until you have to.”

Smart still remembers opening a newspaper at 3 a.m. at a Waffle House and having reality hit him right between the eyes after he’d driven home from Indianapolis in the middle of the night.

“I had a 1988 or 89 Honda Accord …. and I packed up that (car), put everything I owned in it and drove back to Athens,” Smart said on The Growth Project Podcast.

“I remember going to Waffle House, and I picked up the newspaper, and all the old newspapers had lists of who had been cut and who had been released …. and I was like, ‘there it is, right there, that’s my name, it’s the last time it will be in the paper for being any kind of sports athlete, and that’s how it ends.’ ”

Smart, who had signed with the Indianapolis Colts as a free agent after earning All-SEC honors his senior season (1998) with the Bulldogs, says he should have anticipated getting cut.

“I thought I would have a chance in the NFL, I thought I might get drafted — I didn’t get drafted — I got a lot of calls in the last round saying ‘hey we want you to come here as a UFA, undrafted free agent,” Smart recalled.

“Well I end up going to the Indianapolis Colts, where Peyton Manning was at the time, and Peyton was a good friend,” Smart said. “I made it through preseason camp, played preseason games and was one of the last cuts …. but they called me in, and it was like you knew it was coming, but you didn’t know.

So Smart followed the lead of the man who recruited him, former Georgia head coach and SEC Player of the Year Ray Goff, who also turned to the coaching ranks after getting cut from the NFL.

Goff said Sunday he hasn’t been any more surprised to see Smart have great success as he was to see him get involved in coaching.

“Kirby was like a player-coach with all he did,” Goff said, recalling how quickly Smart picked up on things early in his UGA career. “And Kirby’s dad (Sonny) is a great man and was great coach, so like a lot of kids whose fathers are coaches, Kirby followed his lead.”

Still, Smart concedes, it was tough to let go of his dreams to play professionally and transition into the next chapter of life.

“Self-reflection was really tough then, because it was like, ‘Who am I, and what do I identify as?’ " Smart said. “I identified as a Georgia football player and now I wasn’t, and now I had to decide what I was.”

Donnan was about to start his fourth season leading the Georgia program when Smart reached out to him.

“Kirby had come back and he and Mike (Bobo) were close, and Mike was a graduate assistant coach for me,” Donnan said. “But back then, you didn’t have unlimited people you could hire.

“But Kirby said he wanted to get into it, so I created a deal for him where he was a film coach. Really, Kirby was one of the first analysts there was in that sense.

“He would break down film for the defense, but he was also really good in the meetings with players.”

Smart’s official title that season was “administrative assistant,” but his football knowledge was obvious.

Will Muschamp, another Georgia recruit from the Goff coaching era, took note of Smart and helped him get hired full-time on the Valdosta State staff as the defensive backs coach in 2000.

Smart replaced Muschamp as the Blazers’ defensive coordinator the next year when Nick Saban hired Muschamp away to his first LSU staff (2001), and then Smart went to learn under legendary Florida State coach Bobby Bowden as a graduate assistant in 2002-03.

From there, Smart followed Muschamp to LSU in 2004 before a brief return to Georgia to coach running backs under Mark Richt for the 2005 season.

Richt’s plan was to keep Smart on to coach defense, but Nick Saban called with an NFL opportunity with the Miami Dolphins (2006) and then brought Smart with him to Alabama (2007-2015).

Six national championships later — the two most recent leading Georgia — Smart is finally comfortable enough to publicly reflect on his journey.

No doubt, as a leader of young man, Smart shares it with his players as he teaches them to keep their opportunities and the reality of their football futures into perspective.

“It doesn’t matter how many receptions or interceptions you had,” Smart said, “When you get cut, and it’s the final cut, the next time you’re in the paper it’s probably coaching or doing something else.”