99.99 percent of people watching Georgia’s demolition of Oregon at Mercedes Benz Stadium Saturday would say it was a near-perfect day for the Dawgs. That other .01 percent is Bulldog head coach Kirby Smart.
A 49-3 throttling of the 11th-ranked team in the country may not leave much room for improvement on the surface, but Smart told ‘The Steakhouse’ on 92.9 The Game that there’s more than meets the eye when it was all said and done.
“The tape is always the one that tells you the truth," he told Steak Shapiro and Rusty Mansell. "There’s been an old adage in high school football forever—‘the big eye in the sky doesn’t lie.’ When you watch the tape, you see a lot of mistakes. We got some breaks. We had some very fortunate turnovers. Even our opening drive on offense that seems great, we scored, we had a bunch of mistakes. So, it’s just things you can clean up, and I didn’t know that then, but I knew it after watching the tape."
Like many of us, Shapiro said that he turned on the tape and saw seven touchdowns on seven straight possessions, but Smart said with a laugh that therein lies the difference.
“You’re watching the TV and I’m watching the real tape—the one that you can do slo-mo and rewind,” Smart said.
From Malaki Starks’ impressive interception to Jalen Carter slipping through a talented Duck offensive line to Stetson Bennett playing perhaps his best football, it takes a trained eye to find many mistakes from Saturday’s opener, but that’s why Smart is a national championship coach and the recent recipient of a 10-year, $100 million extension.
Check out the full interview with Smart below as he spoke about how this team stays motivated after a national title and much more!