Kirby Smart opened Georgia’s fall camp with a press conference yesterday. One issue that Smart believes may be even more important during this pandemic affected season is depth.

In today’s college football, it can be successfully argued that quality depth is one of the most important contributors in the pursuit of championships. However, quality depth is not just a recruiting initiative. Depth is developed in practice – in fall camp – and fall camp starts today.

Here are Kirby remarks:

“I would certainly say it could rear its head faster this year than years past, based on what we’re seeing in other sports, and the unknown that we don’t know. Depth is going to be key. We’ve preached that to our coaches. Every practice, every walkthrough, everything we’re doing, we’re doing coaching for four groups of people. Now, is our fourth team as good as our first team, absolutely not. But we’re trying to coach like we’re going to have to play a game against an SEC rival with possibly our third or fourth guy. You’ve got to approach it that way and build depth on your team and coach the young guys on your roster. When you go to the NFL or you go out of college football, you don’t get developed. You either make the team or you don’t, there’s no development in the NFL. We have an opportunity to develop our roster and get players better. That’s what we try to do, we try to improve players and get them better all throughout, and that’s what we’ll continue to do. If it shows up this season in our depth, maybe guys have been quarantined, hopefully, we’ll be ready.”