Georgia’s 20-17 win over Alabama gave Kirby Smart a milestone victory in Tuscaloosa. It also gave him something he clearly didn’t want: another round of leaked locker room footage.
Smart said Monday that videos of his pregame and postgame speeches from inside Georgia’s locker room had surfaced, and he made it plain he’s not happy about it. The Bulldogs coach has long built his program around “FPE” - Fire, Passion, and Energy - but he also wants those messages to stay where they belong.
"It's happened before. It's not something I want," Smart said.
"I feel like that's a spot you should be able to feel safe to talk to your team and communicate with your team. It's happened before to us.
We've gotta do a better job managing it, honestly."
The leaked clips came from Saturday’s win over Alabama and showed two very different versions of Smart’s locker room presence. Before the game, he pushed Georgia to match Alabama’s physical style and challenge the Crimson Tide on that front, turning what had been built up as a strength in the matchup into a point of attack for his team.
After the game, the tone shifted to celebration, but the intensity never really left. Smart praised the way Georgia finished the job and pointed to a late sequence involving Craig Dandridge and Alabama’s Dijon Lee Jr., using that moment to highlight Dandridge’s composure after Lee struck him. He also explained why Georgia wanted to keep pushing instead of getting cautious and letting the result hang in the balance.
The speeches offered the kind of raw look at Smart’s voice inside the locker room that usually never leaves the room. This time, they did - and Smart didn’t offer details on where the recordings came from or what Georgia might do to keep it from happening again.
For Dwight Phillips Jr., though, the pregame message sounded exactly like the coach Georgia players know. Asked Monday what it meant to hear Smart have his back, the running back said the locker-room tone is nothing new.
"I mean, for the most part, he's always like that in the locker room," Phillips said. "It just, it fires you up, just gets you ready to play."
That’s the divide in a nutshell: what looks explosive from the outside is just part of the weekly rhythm inside Georgia’s program. Smart wants those conversations protected, and Monday made clear why. He wants a private space to drive his team, not a public replay of it after the fact.
"We've gotta do a better job managing it," Smart said.
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