A year had passed since Kirby Smart’s coming-out party complete with musical entertainment and a concerted get-out-the-fanbase marketing effort, but the annual G-Day scrimmage still drew 66k fans to Athens on a beautiful afternoon.
 
 
Coach Smart talked about the turnout in his postgame press conference:
 
 
“I’m really excited about our fan base. We had 66,000 people. It makes me proud to be a Bulldog. I’m glad they
came out. A lot of recruits made comments about the attendance, and I think any chance you get to have 66,000
people for a practice, that’s an exciting thing. The kids certainly appreciated it. I want to thank the fans for that. I
thought we had a great atmosphere.”
 
 
Smart went on to talk about his sense of the performance of the team:
 
 
“When it comes to the game, the battle in between, it started out kinda slow. When the clock goes as fast as it
does, it seems like the first quarter is over and there’s no score. When the scoring started, it started fast and there
were some explosive plays, which anytime you get a chance to do that, it’s good, especially for your
offense. Obviously, we didn’t run the ball like you want to, but to be honest with you, it wasn’t part of the game
plan. We wanted to see if we could throw the ball some, move the ball around. We would have like to run it
better with the One offense, which we didn’t do, which we have to improve on. But there were some
challenges. We limited the coordinators, we limited the offense with those opportunities. But the best thing that
happened was that you got an opportunity to see quarterbacks try to work the 2-minute drill. So many of our
games come down to critical situations, where it’s using timeouts, opportunities to win the game. That excited
me, and I thought the defense really played hard. Didn’t always tackle well and got some balls thrown over our
heads, but they really competed and challenged each other more than maybe we had done earlier in the
spring. So overall, I was pleased with the day, excited about the growth of our team. I really saw some players
getting better throughout the entire spring.”