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Video/Transcript: Kirby Smart’s Bye Week 1 Presser

On injury updates for Tate Ratledge and Carson Beck…

“I don’t know where all that’s coming from, we got like seven AC joint sprains, so that’s not a significant or major injury. Carson’s fine, he’s practiced both days. Tate does have an ankle; he’s had tightrope already and he’s in the rehab process already. We checked at the night of the game and had to get it fixed and he’s getting it fixed already. So, he’ll be back as soon as he can and expect a healthy and full recovery.” 

On what has stood out to him about Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins…

“His work ethic, he’s done a great job. He talked to the team today about where he was in terms of his mental space when he was a young player and you know obviously thought he should be playing more and it’s funny because he’s matured so much from the time he was like, ‘I should be starting, I should be playing’, to realizing that he wasn’t ready and that he needed to get better. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to play a lot last year because of injury, but he has been able to play a lot this year and he’s done a really good job.”

On if he talks to other coaching staffs about how the prepared for his team…

“It doesn’t work real good when you play them next year.”

On the state legislation passed today…

“Appreciative. We want to be competitive as we can be in our field of endeavor, it’s the world we live in and it’s not just us apparently. It’s the whole state of Georgia, USG, and very appreciative of Governor Kemp and his staff for allowing us to be competitive and putting us on a level playing field and to continue to support our student-athletes. This is going to benefit the student-athletes and I’m very appreciative of them supporting that and getting it done.”

On recent arrests…

“We continue to have guys make poor decisions, it’s very unfortunate and I know that our staff, myself, continue to drive home the sensitive nature of it. It’s certainly a deadly speed when you talk about the speed that he was traveling at and you want kids to grow up, you want to treat them like your own kids, you want them to grow up and make good decisions and learn from others’ mistakes and we have guys share and we obviously continue to talk to them but it hasn’t stopped it so you have to find a way to do it.”

On the progress of Mykel Williams, Warren Brinson and Jordan Hall…

“They’re all working to come back. They’re all doing the rehab process, Warren’s really close, he’s out there doing stuff now. Mykel’s (Williams) running, Jordan’s (Hall) running, so we’re hoping to get those guys back.” 

On how to start faster on offense…

“There are tons of them. Clean up what you do, do it at a higher rate, make good decisions, communicate better. It’s hard to say one thing on that because there’s a lot of things where, not a lot of things go wrong, but one thing going wrong can mess up a play and it takes one person messing up on offense. If one person messes up consecutively, you got three bad plays and certainly we just got to execute better, I think, and do a good job with guys doing what they do in practice. If we do what we do in practice and do it against good people, which they get a chance to do against real good people in practice, they’ll do it better. So, I don’t know if we can point to one thing on that.”

On the offensive line after Ratledge’s injury…

“We play Micah [Morris] a lot. So, we have three guards that play. That’s why we do that because there’s a chance of injury and we play three guys. So, I didn’t see a lot different with him going out. Micah stepped in and played. Micah probably had to play more than he typically does, and he and Dylan (Fairchild) did a good job.” 

On what playing their first road game does for the team…

“I don’t know. It’s better than not having it under your belt, you know. I certainly would like to have played better, really, the entire special teams, offense, defense, so that you gain more confidence from playing on the road. But, you know, I’m glad we got a road game under our belt because it’s tough in the SEC to go on the road. I think I’ve repeatedly said that and I believe that. It’s hard any time you go play, especially when you got a team coming off of a tough loss. So, I’m glad we got that done, but how much confidence it shows is based on what you do this week and how well you prepare.”

On the autonomy Carson Beck has on offense…

“He has to make decisions. He has to make decisions, but he doesn’t have to make…it’s really complicated, Chip. I mean, I’d be sitting here for an hour talking about football. There’s plays that versus certain looks he has to check. So, the play comes in as a run, he has to check to the pass. The play comes in as a pass, he has to check to a run. But then there’s some plays that are checked run to run. There’s some plays that are checked protection. So, they’re a pass and he changes the protection based on it. There’s some plays that are a run that he has to decide which way the run goes and whether he throws the ball on the run to the RPO. So, if you’re asking about checking plays, yeah, he has the ability to check some plays and some plays he doesn’t. Some he has to do based on what the defense is doing, but it’s complicated.”

On Beck’s ability to make checks on offense…

“Carson does a great job of understanding that and knowing what to do and getting hats on people and, you know, that’s why the run game is so critical. The best friend you have on the road in those environments is in the run game, and when you don’t run the ball well, you better be dang good at something.”

On how his approach to the bye week has evolved over time…

“You know, it’s always about improvement. I mean, you know, we’re better never rest. We’re trying to get better all the time, so I’ve never had a bye week that I’ve ever had in all my years coaching that wasn’t about improvement. It’s about detailing that improvement and how are you going to attack it. Are you going to do the same thing you’ve done every year? Well, you may not have the same team. You may not have the same special teams. You may have different needs one year to the next. And, you know, we kind of cater our off week to what we need, and that’s not all based on Kentucky. That’s based on Tennessee Tech. That’s based on Clemson. That’s based on injuries. It’s based on improvement. And we change the schedules each bye week to fit, to suit what we need.”

On what Trevor Etienne brings to the offense…

“Toughness, great leadership, competitor. I mean, Trevor’s one of the best, you know, guys. I mean, I can’t imagine what kind of leader he would be if he had been in the program the whole time, because he’s not afraid to speak out and talk and speak up. And I respect that about him because he doesn’t, you know, he hasn’t had even a full year with these guys, but he’s not afraid to speak up and he’s a tremendous leader in toughness. So that’s what I’ve seen out of him. And I think he’s getting into playing shape. I think it hurt him some, you know, not playing in that first game. And then he didn’t play a lot in the second game. And then he played a lot in the third game. And I’ve challenged him, you know, conditioning wise going into that game that I thought, you know, he might get more action than he had. And he, he did. And he took advantage of it.”

On his approach to recruiting offensive linemen…

“I don’t know that I would agree with your assessment because we don’t necessarily go after heavy. We go after size. Size means a lot of things, right? So, Amarius Mims was our heaviest guy, but he was the lowest body fat and they [NFL coaches] seem to really like him. So, he was 350 pounds and 16, 17 percent body fat, which I think’s the model offensive lineman. I want all linemen to be nimble, but if they’re nimble and they get knocked back, then they’re not as effective. And I’ll be honest with you, the pro game is a little different than our game right now. They also have more starting quarterbacks out in the last two years than ever. So with that said, I don’t know that they can find the right protectors to protect the quarterback.”

On creating depth in the team…

“When you try to gain depth, you practice a lot of people. Not necessarily with the ones. You practice a lot of people. We do ones, twos, and threes. When the ones go, the ones go.

When the twos go, the twos go. When the threes go, the threes go. We got a group of offensive linemen that are five guys that are all true freshmen. They need lots of practice. Because guess what they’re going to be next year? Twos. So, they need lots of practice. They got to get lots of reps because they’re going to be our twos, and we’ve never had that before. We’ve always had this thing where it was like threefold. It was like the guys, and then it was like the Dylan Fairchilds and the Micah [Morris]s and the guys coming up, and then it was like the freshmen. Well, now we don’t have that. So, when I talk about chemistry and getting things going, 100% now, we didn’t have a complete receiving core in camp. London Humphrey’s missing a little bit. Colbie Young missed a little bit because he had this injury, that injury. We had Trevor [Etienne] miss a little time there.We had somebody else, I forget who it was, miss a little bit, so that hurts a little bit. But that has nothing to do with the other. You want to attribute it to something? Attribute it to what I think is two pretty dang good defenses and us not being at our best against Kentucky. We’ve got to improve that. But it’s nothing to do with the preseason camp, I can assure you of that.”

On if state legislation rules affect recruiting…

“I really don’t know how to answer that. I mean, it’s all about what you have available, right? And some people are willing to spend beyond their ability to raise it, like unfulfilled promises. We’re not going to have unfulfilled promises where guys reach back out and say, well, they said they could do this, and they didn’t. They said they could do that, and they didn’t. So, we’ve lost some [recruits] in those regards, but I don’t know that it was an inability to do it. It was not going to go step over our skis and put our body over it and put too much out there and say, ‘Okay, we’ve committed to this.’ You can’t do it. So, it’s a hard world out there because you don’t really know what you can and can’t do. People make promises, but nobody has a bounty sitting out there that big that they can pay everybody that. And so, you try to be judgmental, and you try to make good decisions on players. You want people in your program that are really not making it about just that because when it’s just about that, you don’t ever stop. That’s not going to change based on what the governor does. With the governor’s thing, it’s not like it’s going to be this open surplus. It’s just helping us be competitive with others and I’m sure Georgia Tech feels the same way. You’re out there competing in a really competitive environment. There’s times you feel like you want to do something, and you can’t. Now, hopefully, we’ve got the capabilities to do what we need to do.”

On where the offense needs to improve…

“Communication would be one. When you look back at the game, there were some major communication errors there talking about across the front and communicating who we’re working to, points and things like that. Which a lot of that, some of that, has to do with being on the road and crowd noise and everybody being on the same page. Protecting the quarterback on some pressures that are really easy pickups. Our offensive line, when you look across the country in three years, it’s hard to find teams that have cut one loose, like didn’t block somebody. That’s just, knock on wood, that’s rare for us because we have a very experienced offensive line. They see every pressure known to man from us. That’s something that we do usually well, pick those things up. And they really did that well in the game. There was a couple times we didn’t, and we’ve got to do a better job of that. We’ve got to be able to hit some open guys when they’re open, and we’ve got to be able to do some things in the RPO game that help us. There’s some things we missed in that. And at the end of the day, when you lose momentum in those kind of games, you’ve got to grind them out and find a way. We did not have momentum in that game, and it made it more difficult. When you watch that tape, there are varied things you can point at and say, ‘If we just do this, we’re going to be this much better.’”

On the rotation at center…

“Drew [Bobo] is there, and you want to have three centers at all times. Malachi Toliver’s done a great job, the young kid. We made him into a center when he first got here. He’s gotten to the point that he’s serviceable. He can go in, compete. He’s still a true freshman. We’ve got a couple other guys out there in the last two days snapping so that we’ve got some help there. You always want to have three. You’ve got to have three. We want to have three ready. We’ve got two that we really feel solid about, and then we’ll have a third one here in the next couple days based on what we’re doing.”

Video/Transcript: Jalon Walker, Trevor Etienne and Chaz Chambliss Bye Week 1 Interviews

On the roughing the passer penalty against Kentucky…

“Mid game I was full of frustration, but I realized it’s football. It’s just a game that we’re protecting our quarterback a little more. They said the way I was driving him into the ground I landed on top of him, which caused a personal foul. So, I know now, but I mean it was a bang-bang play. I feel like it was a judgment play, but we move on and fight to the next day.”

On dealing with frustration during the game…

“I don’t sit too long on it. I just really go to the next play, try to make up for it. I’m not a guy who sits and thinks about the plays before. There’s so much going on to just worry about one play that’s in the past and that you can’t change. I preach to my teammates ‘next play, next play’, so we just got to get past it. It is what it is.”

On how he has evolved as a pass rusher…

“I feel like I’m just playing football out there. When the opportunity is gifted to me, I go get it. That’s just what I do. Being a high motor player, I like to go get the quarterback. Once I get the opportunity, the shot to do it, I’ll just do it.”

On his leadership on the team…

“I kind of look at myself as an older guy on the team, being a junior now. This team, the guys embraced me here. I feel like with them being welcoming, opening up, allowing me in their locker room, and being able to be a part of their brotherhood is the reason why I feel comfortable being around those guys.”

On what his brother has taught him about the running back position…

“I definitely learned a lot. I learned how to study the game and how to become a student of the game. Something I said in other interviews is that he always told me ‘Don’t worry about leaving a legacy, live a legacy.’ That’s something I take with me and carry with me through life.”

On what stands out about the offense after watching film…

“Like I said earlier, just execution. We just want to execute the plays better. There is no perfect play but there is perfect execution of the play. If we can go out there and execute every play to the best we can, that will put our team in a better situation.”

On his performance against Kentucky…

“I always love a team that sticks to what they do, and they just try and pound it all game. Huge respect to that team. It’s a great, tough team. They play hard-nosed football. They’re a lot like us, the way we run our program. I love those type of games where it’s just downhill run, just old-school football, just man-on-man.”

On Jalon Walker’s start to the season…

“He’s starting off fast. You’ve seen it ever since his freshman year. He has that get-off, he has speed, and he has that ability to dip and get under blockers. It’s just really hard to block him. He’s got all the traits and everything to be a world-class rusher.”

On Brock Vandagriff…

“He played his butt off. He had a bunch of rushing yards on us. He did a great job of scrambling when we covered up receivers downfield. He did a great job on pulling and reading our defense when they were in read options a lot. I talked to him after the game. Obviously, it was a tough loss for them. It was a close loss. I didn’t talk too much, let him have his space, and talked to him after that.”

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