ATHENS — The Georgia football world celebrates the beginning --and ongoing -- Dawgs’ Dynasty today on the UGA campus and within Sanford Stadium.
Coach Kirby Smart and his Bulldogs pulled off a perfect 15-0 season, ending it in the most dominant fashion in college football playoff history, with a 65-7 win over TCU at SoFi Stadium last Monday night.
RELATED: Georgia stakes claim to dynasty, story of Bulldogs 65-7 win over Horned Frogs
It was neither the beginning, nor likely the end, of Smart’s reign atop college football.
The celebration
Not all bow to “King Kirby,” even after his back-to-back national championships, but at the very least, he has cemented his status as a first-ballot College Football Hall of Famer.
Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks and his support staff have planned a grand parade complete with “Dawg Walk” that will begin at 12:30 p.m. on campus around the intersection of S. Lumpkin Street and Pinecrest.
The players will march in from Baxter Street, a modified Dawg Walk leading into a program at Sanford Stadium that begins at 2 p.m., giving Smart and his players one final chance to see the Bulldogs’ fans, and for the Georgia fans to cheer them back.
It’s an important day of acknowledgement, but also, an opportunity for Smart to showcase the program to the recruits that will be on hand.
The Bulldogs’ 47-year-old head coach is a master at time management and deliberate activities, a model of efficiency in the coaching world.
Five days ago Smart sat alongside defensive MVP Javon Bullard and Brock Bowers — who was filling in for offensive MVP Stetson Bennett at the champions press conference — and revealed a sense of uneasiness.
“I am concerned about our season next year,” Smart said. “The entire flight home, I’ll think about things we can do right now. W-I-N (What’s Important Now) — that’s our motto.
“There will be time to take off, it’s just not today because decisions are imminent.”
Moving forward
Georgia has eight players in the transfer portal, a handful of juniors who have declared for the 2023 NFL Draft, and a couple of others who are riding the fence and might still be influenced by the gut feelings they get today in Sanford Stadium.
Might one or two players prove make-or-break difference-makers for a three-peat season in 2023?
Smart flashed three fingers to the Georgia stadium faithful who took over SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles last Monday night, out-numbering purple-clad TCU fans 2-to-1.
The UGA head coach has since reeled himself back in, no longer caught up in the emotion of his team’s great performance.
“I really don’t want to talk about three,” Smart said the next morning. “It’s human nature to relax, it’s human nature to the the easy route, and I can be as guilty of that as anyone.”
But of course, Smart wasn’t, and that’s why there were 10 coaches out recruiting on Friday, each visiting 10 schools.
There were reportedly three different helicopters used with Smart and his staff popping up all over all day.
Championship sparks
It wasn’t so long ago — five years — that Smart hit the recruiting trail as heartbroken as anyone in the Georgia fanbase.
Two years into his dream job leading the Bulldogs’ football program, Smart dealt with a 26-23 overtime loss to Alabama.
It drove him even harder that recruiting season, as he was back out on the trail some 48 hours after Tua Tagovailoa connected with Devonta Smith on second-and-26.
“You can’t let it beat you twice,” Smart said he told his staff, as Georgia attacked the recruiting trail with energy and positive enthusiasm.
Another beginning
Now, fast-forwarding to a parade and celebration at Sanford Stadium five years later, Smart’s resolve is to not allow the Bulldogs’ back-to-back national championships leave an opening for complacency.
“I do think it’s going to be much tougher, and I do think we’re going to have to reinvent ourselves next year, because you can’t just stay the same,” Smart said.
“We have a lot of guys, in my opinion, that are going to come back and it’s easy to get comfortable — and comfortable does not win.”
It’s a certainty Smart’s 2022 victory speech will provide as much motivation for the future as it does reflect back on a group he will remember for its resiliency and work ethic.
“My saying is you’ve got to be better at the process than everybody else is,” Smart said. “You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be better at it than everybody else is.”
That was the case 14 of 15 times in 2021, when Smart’s program finally broke a championship drought that dated back to 1980, toppling Alabama in the process.
Fifteen times in 15 games, Georgia was better than their opponents in 2022, leading to the Saturday view from Sanford Stadium, atop the college football world.
