Opinion: Georgia coach Kirby Smart must change Bulldogs’ approach before it’s too late

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There comes a time when every coach in the ever-evolving sport of college football gets smacked across the nose by the realization that their philosophy is outdated, that their preferred approach needs a course correction to keep up with the opponents they most need to beat. 

For a large percentage of people in this finicky profession, that moment comes too late. But Georgia’s Kirby Smart still has time. He would be well advised not to let too much more expire.  

Georgia’s 44-28 loss Saturday to Florida is the fork-in-the-road moment of Smart’s tenure, the game in which it became clear that his program has been passed by its most important rival and that trying to play football like it’s still 2010 no longer is the right path to win a national championship. 

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It’s perfectly understandable why Smart wants to build his program around defense, why he’s trying to recreate the dominant Alabama teams he was part of a decade ago. But college football has changed. Even Nick Saban understands that, having his own epiphany after two national championship game tussles with Deshaun Watson-led Clemson in 2015 and 2016.

You can’t just run the dang ball anymore and win a national championship. You need to push the tempo, you need to spread the field and you need to be comfortable with a quarterback who can make dynamic plays and aggressive throws.

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If you’re not? You can’t keep up.

Smart has often been criticized in big games for coaching too conservatively, but that’s not exactly true. If anything, Smart has whiplashed between having too much confidence in his defense and taking huge, unnecessary risks – like ill-timed fake punts and field goals. 

It’s more about his core philosophy as a former defensive coordinator and a believer in the bedrock principles of winning the line of scrimmage and putting his best athletes in position to win their matchups. But that doesn’t necessarily conflict with the reality of college football in 2020: You have to score to win, and you have to be comfortable as a coach with the idea that you can play good defense and still give up points. 

© John Raoux, AP Georgia coach Kirby Smart signals to his players during the first half against Florida, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020, in Jacksonville, Fla.

Saban surely doesn’t love the fact that his team came into Saturday ranked 49th nationally in total defense, but he’s smart enough to know that the only teams that will play for national titles for the foreseeable future are teams built around great quarterback play. 

Alabama has it. Florida has it. Georgia does not. 

The Bulldogs have tried Stetson Bennett, who is a former walk-on for a reason. They tried D’Wan Mathis, a 6-foot-6 redshirt freshman who flashed a little bit late in the game against Florida but is going to have to work through lots of mistakes. They still have JT Daniels, the former five-star recruit and Southern Cal starter who started the season still recovering from an ACL tear but hasn’t really resurfaced even since being declared healthy. 

The word out of Georgia is that Bennett has continued to start since Week 2 because nobody has beaten him out, but that’s a kind of an indictment on its own. Bennett was finally pulled early in the third quarter after an interception with his team down 41-21.

In the short-term, it’s unclear where Georgia goes from here. It’s also uninteresting at this point, since the Bulldogs aren’t going to win the SEC East or make the College Football Playoff. 

The real intrigue lies with Smart: Does he double-down on an offensive philosophy stuck in the last decade, or will he look to modernize his program and unleash offensive coordinator Todd Monken, who arrived with a lot of fanfare after last season but whose impact has been hard to discern? 

He needs to choose wisely, and quickly. For everything that has worked at Georgia under Smart — winning 77% of his games, winning the SEC East three straight years, coming within a breath of a national championship in 2017 — it is not a birthright to play for SEC titles. If you don’t beat Florida, none of that happens. 

That’s what has to concern Georgia fans as the 2020 season winds down. You can re-litigate the Justin Fields situation as much as you want — and, yes, Smart should have invested more in Fields’ development as a freshman in 2018 before he pulled the plug and went to Ohio State — but what’s done is done. 

Every elite program has a next guy these days. Georgia can’t seem to find or keep enough of them. So Smart has to go with what he’s got, and Saturday was a clear referendum that it wasn’t enough. 

Few games this season have been easier to analyze. Florida finished with nearly 600 yards of offense against one of the nation’s supposedly best defenses, including 474 through the air. Georgia finished with 277, more than a quarter of which came on the game’s first play when Zamir White ran for a 75-yard touchdown. Their quarterbacks completed nine passes combined, not including three thrown to the other team. 

In other words, Florida looked like the future. Georgia looked like the past. But nothing is written forever in college football. There’s a choice to be made for Smart. And as of Saturday, time is a-ticking. 

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Georgia coach Kirby Smart must change Bulldogs’ approach before it’s too late