Head Coach Kirby Smart wants to get physical. At least he wants this Georgia team to be physical, and he made a point to talk about wanting the Bulldog’s offense to be physical and explosive in Tuesday’s presser from day one of spring practice when asked about offensive and defensive philosophies.
And how can Georgia be physical on offense? Run the darn ball of course!
“We want to be physical and we want to be explosive on offense. We’ve got to be able to run the ball. How do we do that? … That identity has got to be created through being able to run the ball.”
Now, there will be more to Georgia’s offensive philosophy than simply being physical and running the ball, but Coach Smart made it clear that it is a work in progress as they are still evaluating who they have as far as players and what those players are capable of doing and handling.
We’ve got to figure out what these players can do before we can figure out who we are. To an extent you could say you should know. Yeah, we’ve been through offseason conditioning, we’ve been through workouts, but to say that I know what our groupings are going to be – is it going to be a three-wide grouping, two tight ends, two-wide, two backs – I have no idea until we found out more about our personnel. The identity—we’ve got to be able to run the ball, we’ve got to have explosive passes, we’ve got to be able to throw the ball down the field. You’re going to say that’s broad, I’m going to say we don’t know until we find out more about our personnel. We don’t make our personnel fit Jim Chaney’s offense. We can’t do that.
I would like to point one particular sentence in that statement, well you got me … two. “We don’t make our personnel fit Jim Chaney’s offense. We can’t do that.” One of the complaints that arose about last year’s offensive coaching staff was not utilizing players properly and trying to make them fit Brian Schottenheimer’s offense instead of putting them in positions to succeed and make plays. Whether that is true or not, I don’t know, but there were a number of questions as to why Georgia didn’t utilize Keith Marshall more at RB in space or why the tight ends were hardly used as receivers to name just a couple. Hopefully, with this new staff, we will see better utilization of the players’ skill sets and strengths than we have in the past.
On the defensive side of the ball, Kirby pointed out that Georgia has to be able to play fast and mistake free football when doing so to be successful against those offenses that run “up-tempo” and no-huddle. Fans will also be happy to know that Coach Smart is not a fan of giving up the big play either; so, hopefully, we will not see anything resembling the dreaded “third and Grantham.”
“Defensively, it’s very simple. We’ve got to not make many mental errors. We’ve got to be able to go fast because teams are going to go super fast on us. We’ve got to be really sharp. We’ve got to be really smart to not make mistakes and not give up big plays. In this day and age, the teams that give up explosive plays and don’t get turnovers are the ones that get in trouble. We’re going to really emphasize that this spring and create an identity through that.”
There has been debate among analysts and fans on what type of defense that Kirby Smart and Mel Tucker will run. Will it be a 3-4 or 4-3 base and how often will the defense be in that alignment. How similar will it be to former defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt’s defense or will it resemble more of what we have seen at Alabama the last several years? Will it be something totally different? While Kirby didn’t come out and give any specifics, he did make a couple of interesting comments:
“We’re going to have a 3-4 base, but we’ll also have 4-3. Everybody said Alabama was 3-4. We were 4-3 over 60 percent of the time. The similarities will be with 3-4 and 4-3. You’ll say what percentage. It depends on what the offense is doing. So I can’t answer that question. We will have position meetings out of a 3-4 shell, where there will be outside backers and inside backers, but every outside backer has to have a role. Is he a defensive end or is he an inside backer and sub? So we build the defense that way where they get reps in practice at both. They’re kind of hybrid players. That’s no change really from what they did last year, to be honest.”
And that makes sense. In today’s college football, with the type of offenses that a defense must face, it cannot be unmalleable. It has to be flexible.
The message is clear. Finding out who this 2016 Georgia Bulldog’s football team is, that is a work in progress, but it is journey that the coaching staff and the players have begun and will discover this spring. And it is going to be a physical process at that.