Kirby Smart made it clear Monday that Georgia’s locker room is supposed to be a protected space, not a place where speeches end up online for the whole world to hear.
The Bulldogs coach spoke publicly for the first time after two videos leaked from inside the locker room following Georgia’s 20-17 win over Alabama. One clip captured Smart’s pregame address, the other his postgame message, and both offered a raw look at how he pushes his team before and after one of the biggest wins of the season.
“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.”
Smart has built “FPE” - Fire, Passion, and Energy - into a major part of Georgia’s identity over the last two years, and nobody has ever confused him for a coach short on emotion. The leaked recordings just put that intensity on display in a way the public usually never sees.
In the pregame speech from Saturday, Smart pushed Georgia to match Alabama’s physicality and, in his telling, answer the Crimson Tide’s focus on that part of the matchup. The message was pointed, forceful, and aimed at making sure the Bulldogs set the tone instead of getting dragged into someone else’s game.
Georgia answered with a 20-17 victory, giving Smart his first win in Tuscaloosa as Georgia’s head coach.
The postgame speech carried the same edge, with Smart praising the way his team finished while stressing the aggressive mindset that helped seal the result. He pointed to a late moment involving Georgia’s Craig Dandridge and Alabama’s Dijon Lee Jr., crediting Dandridge for staying composed after Lee struck him and explaining why Georgia wanted to win outright instead of backing off and leaving the game in doubt.
Smart did not say where the recordings came from, and he did not lay out any specific fix for keeping this from happening again. But his comment that it had happened before made one thing obvious: the issue is more than a one-off annoyance.
For Dwight Phillips Jr., though, the pregame message sounded pretty normal for Georgia. When asked Monday what it meant to hear Smart backing the team in that setting, the running back described it as just part of life in the program.
“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 split here: what sounds explosive from the outside is, inside the program, part of the routine. Smart wants those moments to stay inside the building, where they’re meant to be heard.
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