“It’s very important that we don’t make the same mistakes twice. That’s a big part of improvement.”
― Kirby Smart
“How do you play well? You practice well. You prepare well.”
― Kirby Smart
“At the end of the day, you have to go out on the grass and perform.”
― Kirby Smart
“Every kid I’ve been around as a football player, they want their coaches to make them better as men and as players.”
― Kirby Smart
“If you chart SEC champions over a 20-year period, the one consistent thing to me is you’re not going to win if you don’t have a quarterback. It’s too critical of a position. He decides something every play.”
― Kirby Smart
“When you step out there on the field as a corner in our system, you have to be ready to play because humility is one week away.”
― Kirby Smart
“At the end of the day, if you’re not beating the teams on the road recruiting that you have to beat on the field, then you’re probably not going to win many championships.”
― Kirby Smart
“We’ve got to recruit at the same level of the people who are winning titles and playing for titles, and to do that, we’ve got to have great facilities.”
― Kirby Smart
“When your mom and dad read the paper, they like to know their sons are on the roster.”
― Kirby Smart
“It never stops. It’s 365 recruiting. That cell phone you’ve got, these smartphones are the death of college coaching.”
― Kirby Smart
“The amount of pressure that I’ve put on myself as a defensive coordinator for the last 10, 11 years, I really believe there’s a lot more decisions that go into that position than the head coach.”
― Kirby Smart
“Change is uncomfortable.”
― Kirby Smart
“I think in order to push kids and coach kids the way we want to coach them, we’ve got to have their trust.”
― Kirby Smart
“I think, as a coach, you have to be willing to do what’s best for the player. And you say what’s best for the player: is it better to give him a game suspension, three-game suspension, no suspension. I think each case may be different in that.”
― Kirby Smart
“I’m a big believer in your offensive limitations come from your quarterback.”
― Kirby Smart
“I’ve seen Coach Saban over the years have to make a lot of tough decisions, and there’s not one decision he doesn’t make that he doesn’t bounce ideas off the staff. To me, that’s invaluable.”
― Kirby Smart
“I think it’s what’s best for that kid. Are you going to teach that kid a lesson for 10 years down the road by suspending him a game?”
― Kirby Smart
“I don’t recruit against Nick Saban. I recruit for the University of Georgia.”
― Kirby Smart
“A lot of people think our standard is to be first in the SEC, be first in the country, first in our red zone, and run defense. We really don’t go by that motto. We go by, ‘Be the best Alabama defense there’s been.’”
― Kirby Smart
“My family’s so happy in Tuscaloosa. My wife loves it.”
― Kirby Smart
“I moved seven times the first seven years I coached.”
― Kirby Smart
“I could finish my career being a defensive coordinator and say, ‘Hey, he’s Mickey Andrews.’”
― Kirby Smart
“Every college coach I talk to won’t say it on record, but everyone’s thinking, ‘Should I go to the league?’ Because you don’t have the same requirements. It’s different. The hours are different.”
― Kirby Smart
“I’ve got recruits that will text and call and do everything in the middle of the night. And I’m thinking, ‘I’m with my family.’ But you’ve got to dedicate time to that, or you can’t do it.”
― Kirby Smart
“Every day I pull into that parking spot that says ‘Head Football Coach,’ I get out of my car and pinch myself sometimes, just to make sure it’s real, sort of like, ‘Is this really happening?’”
― Kirby Smart
“Let’s be honest. Georgia, if you get the best players in this state, you should be winning championships.”
― Kirby Smart
“It’s always a danger when you’ve got a great quarterback that throws the ball well, that scrambles well. You may push him into his asset. You may force him to do what he does best. So you’ve got to be able to throw curveballs and stop the pass as much as stop the run.”
― Kirby Smart
“There’s a lot of people who think in order to be a good head coach, you’ve got to be a head coach at a smaller school.”
― Kirby Smart
“It’s very rare that Georgia and Alabama are the only two teams recruiting a kid.”
― Kirby Smart
“It’s never me against Saban, and I have too much respect for him to say that anyway. I never felt that way.”
― Kirby Smart
“I felt like I was selling a product of the University of Georgia that’s really special and really special to me as far as the education you can get, the development you can get, and the league we play in. That’s what I’ve sold.”
― Kirby Smart
“Coach Richt is a good friend of mine. I respect Coach Richt and worked for him for a year and respect the man he is and respect what he stands for.”
― Kirby Smart
“A team is a group of young men playing together. The program is the entirety of that.”
― Kirby Smart
“Welcome to the world we live in as coaches. You’ve got to figure out what you can do best and better to get these kids a chance to be successful. I think that comes through a lot of things – confidence, improvement, recruiting.”
― Kirby Smart
“What I’m worried about is our team and our players developing and getting better. That’s the most important thing.”
― Kirby Smart
“You’ve got to be diversified enough. That’s the truth in the SEC and in college football.”
― Kirby Smart
“When you talk about the SEC, you never get a chance to rest.”
― Kirby Smart
“What you have success with, you feel comfortable with, you always rely on that a little bit.”
― Kirby Smart
“It’s a lot more important to get quality young men and good student-athletes that can be successful at the University of Georgia. That’s my No. 1 goal.”
― Kirby Smart
“It’s hard to say that it gets any better to be at your alma mater and run a major college football program.”
― Kirby Smart
“Every young man that we want to bring here to the University of Georgia, we want them to graduate from this place.”
― Kirby Smart
“I always felt like, one of the niches is if you can recruit the SEC, you can be a head coach in the SEC.”
― Kirby Smart
“I might not have a conference championship or a national championship as a head coach, but I had the recruiting factor.”
― Kirby Smart
“The ultimate deal is: Are you winning and are you successful? The guys who’ve done that have had opportunities.”
― Kirby Smart
“The only thing that matters with my kids are them graduating and playing well, and I try to do my dangedest to get them to play well.”
― Kirby Smart
“I don’t believe in the coach-in-waiting thing. I don’t think that works.”
― Kirby Smart
“I’ve been very fortunate to be with Coach Saban this long, learned a lot of football from him. It’s been kind of the key to my personal success out of the places that I’ve coached.”
― Kirby Smart
“To me, personally, my development to become a head coach will be much better working for Coach Saban than necessarily going somewhere else because you learn every day that you’re in there.”
― Kirby Smart
“There’s nothing worse than recruiting a player and then leaving the player.”
― Kirby Smart
“To be honest, it makes you a lot better coach when your boss is in the meeting room. You’re a lot more driven every day.”
― Kirby Smart
“I don’t think I’ve worked a day in my life.”
― Kirby Smart
“Coach Saban’s a great coach; he does it his way, and I have to do it my way. I have to cut my own cloth.”
― Kirby Smart
“My goal is to outwork everybody in recruiting, sign the best players in the state, and turn these guys into the best team we can.”
― Kirby Smart
“I think the growth you get from working at a place like Alabama and with a program under Nick Saban, it helps me immensely.”
― Kirby Smart
“A lot of people have said, ‘Why not take a smaller school head job?’ I honestly feel my growth was better being in a large program, being around Coach Saban, and learning how to manage a lot of the tough situations you deal with in the media.”
― Kirby Smart
“I think you never leave what you learn.”
― Kirby Smart
“Our personalities are the not the same, Coach Saban and I. And I have the utmost respect for what he’s done and what he’s done for me and my family.”
― Kirby Smart
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