It’s no secret that Georgia head coach Kirby Smart is one of, if not the best, coaches in college football. He led the Bulldogs to back-to-back national titles in 2021 and 2022, and aside from his first season, has never had a year below double-digit wins.
It’s easy to overlook Smart’s greatness in the moment, but CBS Sports’ Josh Pate believes that the Bulldogs will be set up in the future because of what Kirby is doing right now.
Josh Pate Breaks Down Kirby Smart’s Legacy, How He Changed Georgia’s Future
The Georgia Bulldogs are coming off a 2024 season in which they won the SEC championship and earned a first-round bye in the College Football Playoff. While for most programs, that would be great, for the Bulldogs, many analysts and fans considered it to be a down year.
On his show, “Josh Pate’s College Football Show,” the analyst explained that those kinds of expectations for the Georgia Bulldogs are exactly what makes Kirby Smart so special.
It was viewed as a down year, and yet they won their conference. That’s the standard that Kirby Smart has set at Georgia,” Pate said. He further praised Smart, as he believes he is the only coach in the country who has come close to the standard Nick Saban built in Tuscaloosa.
“He’s the only guy to even come remotely close to duplicating what Saban had at Alabama,” Pate said.
But Smart is shaping more than just the present at Georgia. Pate explained that before Smart arrived at Georgia, the University and the fanbase were okay with being the second — or third-best team in the SEC. They weren’t aware of the program’s potential.
