Expectations are already sky high for Kirby Smart at Georgia

ByCHRIS LOW
May 26, 2016, 11:07 AM

— -- ATHENS, Ga. -- The May evaluation period is winding to a close, and the assistant coaches' offices at Georgia's Butts-Mehre football complex on this rainy morning are mostly empty.

The assistants are scattered out on the road recruiting, and as their boss so appropriately puts it, trying to find players who can beat Alabama.

"That's the standard in this league," says Georgia first-year coach Kirby Smart, who has had a close-up view of that standard for the past nine years, as one of Nick Saban's most trusted assistants. "At the end of the day, if you're not beating the teams on the road recruiting that you have to beat on the field, then you're probably not going to win many championships."

Like all head coaches, Smart isn't allowed by the NCAA to be off campus recruiting in May, but he's still going 100 mph prepping for a different kind of recruiting trip. He's about to catch a plane to visit a group of big-money boosters, and he's taking a video his staff put together of some of the swanky facilities other programs in the SEC, namely Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee and Texas A&M, have built in recent years.

"We've got to recruit at the same level of the people who are winning titles and playing for titles, and to do that, we've got to have great facilities," Smart explains. "We have the resources and the people within the radius of us to build those facilities, and we're going to recruit like crazy. We've just got to have the facilities to get them in here."

Georgia was behind at least half the SEC schools -- and just about everybody in the Western Division -- in the facilities arms race when Smart was hired. A long-awaited $30.2 million indoor practice facility was already in the works and should be completed by January. Smart's checklist also includes an expanded locker room at Sanford Stadium, a recruiting lounge at the stadium for recruits and their families and a new weight room that will feed into the indoor facility.

"We have to keep up, and that's the message I'm putting out there," says Smart, who is candid about the stakes of taking over for Mark Richt, who averaged nearly 10 wins over his 15-year career and was universally respected, yet was still fired.

Five-year plans in college football have long since been extinct, especially in the SEC. They went out with the rotary phone. Even four-year plans can be sketchy, and though nobody's coming right out and saying it, the fan base in Georgia, now brimming with optimism, will quickly turn impatient if Smart hasn't won an SEC title within three years.

"Let's be honest. Georgia, if you get the best players in this state, you should be winning championships," says Smart, who hasn't slowed down since he returned to his alma mater in January.

The Bulldogs recruited well in Smart's first class (seventh nationally in ESPN's rankings). He's confident they will recruit even better in the 2017 class, in which they are currently fourth in ESPN's rankings. Smart knows the state of Georgia and its high school coaches like he knows the 3-4 defense -- like he's one of their own.

That's because he is. The Bainbridge, Georgia, native is the son of a high school coach and played for the Bulldogs from 1995 to '98, including as a team captain the last season.

"I think that's why so many people are excited to see Kirby back," says former Georgia coach Jim Donnan, who coached Smart his last three years at Georgia and gave him his start in coaching as a graduate assistant in 1999. "He's helped bring a lot of the Georgia people together. He's been able to jump right in because he does know so many people, and they know him. He knows what needs to be done here and knows what a championship program looks like, and I think you saw with the 93,000 showing up at the spring game that he's got the fans behind him."