ATHENS — Junior linebacker Raylen Wilson said the quiet part out loud when it comes to Georgia’s slogan for the 2025 season.
“I feel like everybody’s more bought into the fire, passion, energy thing because I feel like nowadays college football, mostly people care more about money,” Wilson said. “Here we make sure that’s not the biggest issue. We focus on the passion and the love for the game.”
The way some recruiting battles have gone this offseason would certainly indicate that Georgia is not going to go above and beyond to entice players to come to Athens. The Bulldogs missed out on Jackson Cantwell, Mark Bowman, Tyler Atkinson and James Johnson in part because of the financials
Wilson, who was five-star linebacker in the 2023 recruiting cycle, was not swayed by the same lucrative offers as a prospect.
“On my end, I came in not caring about the money,” Wilson said. “We didn’t talk about money before I came here. I was just focused on development and the bigger thing after this.”
Georgia though has the No. 1-ranked recruiting class in the country at this point in time. You don’t do that cheaply either.
Money still matters at Georgia. It just can’t be the only thing that matters, especially with the NFL just on the horizon.
Georgia has become an NFL factory, putting 55 players in the pros. No school has more.
Part of the reason Georgia has been able to build that pipeline is because of how hard Georgia makes things during the month of August.
“Camp’s a grind, and ours certainly is a grind,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said on Thursday. “And then connection, leaning on each other, staying in a hotel for, I don’t know, eight, nine, 10 days, 15 practices in 18 days, two scrimmages. It’s not easy, and it’s hot. So we wanna really develop this mental and physical toughness.
“We think (it) carries us through the season. So our coaches have done a great job preparing for this and getting a lot of informative tape, NFL tape, NFL quotes, past history camps here, watching guys that are now in the league that came through here.”
At multiple instances in the past month, Smart has spoken about how young this Georgia team, in particular, will be. He’s told reporters multiple times that 54% of the roster is in their first or second year in college.
With 27 freshmen and 10 transfers, Georgia has 37 new players in the program this fall.
Those totals help explain why Smart is so often stressing the importance of fire, passion and energy.
His players certainly hear that message.
“It starts with our motto: just fire, passion and energy,” offensive lineman Micah Morris said. “The way that we’re trying to attack every day, taking it day by day, we can’t really focus on the past or the future. All we can do is just try to get better now because what happened in the past, we can’t go back and change it. Just trying to make sure that to get the outcome that we want, we’ve got to get 1% better every day.”
Georgia will be a different team this coming season, in part because of the new faces. The Bulldogs didn’t have the season they wanted to in 2024, even though it won the SEC. The vibes just felt off.
Many of those veterans are now gone, with Georgia having 13 players taken in last year’s NFL Draft.
Those departures create plenty of opportunities for a young Georgia team.
One that is eager to play with a lot of fire, passion and energy.
“I see it in the players every day,” Smart said. “And it starts with 110 heat index last week, seeing them out there running in that and facing it. And they don’t always have it all the way through that 110 Heat Index with five or 10 or 20 53s they got to run. But they do push and challenge each other. That’s what I’ve enjoyed about this team so far, is they’re not afraid to hold each other accountable and get after each other, because they know that they’re stronger together than they are apart.”
