ATHENS — Kirby Smart is a tough critic, but that’s what comes with the territory when you’ve created a monster of expectations that need to be fed.

The Georgia head coach applauded his team’s effort in Scrimmage One of fall camp, but he made sure to point out these Bulldogs have not been tested with the sort of heat typical of summers in Athens to this point in August.

“The temperature made things not as trying, not as mentally tough,” Smart said, his team scrimmaging amid a heat index in the low-to-mid-80s on Saturday. “I thought the speeds were good. You look back over the years, and the first term (of fall drills) is always a lot of heat. Also they are coming after hot practices, so it’s not just that day, it’s what’s happened the previous three or four days.

RELATED: 10 promising things from Georgia Fall Scrimmage One

“The totality of practicing 110, 105 heat index a couple of days in a row can take its toll on that scrimmage, and that wasn’t the case this time.”

Smart neglected to provide an answer when asked to assess the overall performance of Gunner Stockton — onlookers said Stockton did not make catastrophic mistakes, but the first-team started slow and had issues getting the ball in the end zone. But Smart but he did provide encouraging news on the progress of back-up quarterbacks Ryan Puglisi and Ryan Montgomery.

RELATED: Where things stand with quarterbacks after Scrimmage One of fall camp

Smart, it seemed, spoke in a tone that suggests he knows his young team has room to improve — and must improve — for Georgia to reach its lofty standards.

Smart’s assessment of the tight ends was case in point, as he qualified what onlookers reported was a generally good day for the deep and talented unit.

“I guess you’re all looking at what somebody reported to you, I really don’t know, but I look at the tight ends as a whole in that room, and each one of them did some really good things in the scrimmage, and then each one of them did some really poor things in the scrimmage,” Smart said. “That includes [Jaden] Reddell, and that includes Oscar [Delp], and that includes Lawson [Luckie], and that includes Elyiss [Williams], and that includes Ethan [Barbour]. So they all had some positives and some negatives when it comes to that.”

Georgia’s football team might still be in the fall camp stages of development, but Smart was in midseason form with his sharp and sometimes short responses in the Tuesday press conference.

For all the talk about Georgia having the “best tight ends room in the nation, Smart said there’s a need for improvement and more contributions.

“I’m hoping they continue to get better and have more positives than negatives,” Smart said. “I hope that they contribute on special teams, because we need those guys to be able to help us in special teams.

“At the end of the day, you get judged at tight end, not on (catching) a play action pass where you’re wide open, you didn’t do anything. What did you do? You get judged on, can you break tackles? And I don’t know that we had any tight ends breaking tackles.”

Smart, upon further review, made it clear there were no Brock Bowers-like moments, where a tight end slipped or broke a tackle to make an explosive play.

“There’s probably not one tight end who broke a tackle,” Smart said. “So when you break tackles, it’s something that great players do. Good players just catch the ball and go down where they get you.”

And great coaches, like Smart, stay on top of young players to make sure they get the best out of themselves.

That seemed to be the messaging on Tuesday, as Smart knows time is running out before the Bulldogs open the season against Marshall on Aug. 30.