Kirby Smart’s first 10 years in Athens have produced a run of numbers that would have sounded outrageous when he was hired. Georgia was looking for a coach who could drag the program back into the national spotlight, and Smart has done far more than that. He has turned the Bulldogs into the standard-bearer.
The clearest sign of that shift starts with Georgia’s rivals. Smart was brought in to make the Bulldogs the bully in the neighborhood, and that’s exactly what happened.
Georgia is 26-4 combined against Florida, Auburn and Georgia Tech during his tenure. Two of those losses came in 2016, his first season, which means he has only dropped two games to those three opponents since then.
The streaks tell the same story. Georgia has won nine straight against Auburn, five in a row against Florida and eight consecutive meetings with Georgia Tech. That kind of control over the people around you is how a program stops being a good team and starts acting like a power.
Smart also checked off the SEC box quickly. Georgia hadn’t won the conference in a decade when he arrived, but he got the Bulldogs there in 2017, just his second year.
That alone might have been written off as a one-off. Instead, he proved it wasn’t.
Georgia won the SEC again in 2022, then after losing the 2023 SEC Championship game, Smart guided the Bulldogs to back-to-back SEC Championships in 2024 and 2025. That gives him four SEC titles in 10 years.
The playoff record is just as strong when you zoom out from the recent frustration. Georgia is one of only five schools to reach the College Football Playoff at least five times, and the Bulldogs have gone 5-3 in those appearances.
That .625 winning percentage is tied with Alabama for the best mark among those five programs. Ohio State sits at 7-5 (.583), Clemson at 6-5 (.545), and Oklahoma’s 0-5 record shows how brutal that stage can be.
Then there’s the biggest line on Smart’s résumé: the national championships. Georgia went 41 years without one before Smart ended the drought with a victory over Alabama in 2021.
He wasn’t finished there. The Bulldogs went back-to-back the next season with a perfect 15-0 record, giving Georgia the second-most championships in the playoff era behind Alabama’s three.
The last three seasons have brought some frustration, and Georgia fans have made that clear. But after two national titles, the bar in Athens is different now.
Smart changed that. He changed the expectations, the results and the way Georgia is viewed across the sport.
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Gunner Stockton has spent the offseason getting a longer look at Georgias new pass-catching mix, and one name has already stood out to him. The Bulldogs quarterback said transfer wide receiver Isiah Canion has made a strong impression in workouts, pointing to the way he has fit in with the group and the effort he has brought since arriving on campus.
Stockton also made clear he understands what Georgia is trying to replace after last season, when Zachariah Branch was the go-to standout in the room. Even so, he sounded encouraged by the direction of the receiver group and by the way the offense is coming together around him, leaving the bigger question for fall camp: how quickly can all of that offseason chemistry turn into production when the games start? [Read more 🡒]
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What makes the situation notable is less the number itself than the way Georgia continues to operate under Kirby Smart. The Bulldogs are still landing elite backs without chasing the biggest check on the board, leaning instead on development, winning and the belief that the right fit can matter more than the flashiest offer. For a program that has built its identity on sustaining success, that approach remains a pretty strong selling point. [Read more 🡒]