In two of the last three big games Georgia has played, Kirby Smart and the coaching staff have been badly outcoached. Against Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, Marcus Freeman baited the Dawgs into a crushing penalty at one of the game’s inflection points. And as both Macon and Lugnut pointed out yesterday, the Dawgs came out unprepared for Alabama’s hot start, fell into a hole early, and made bad calls (most clearly not kicking the field goal) that sealed the team’s fate Saturday.
In the coaching staff’s defense, I do think they deserve a ton of credit for the Tennessee win. After a disastrous start to that game, they kept a young team from imploding and helped to guide them back to a thrilling victory. However crushing it is to lose to Bama yet again, I don’t think we’re in freefall yet.
Still, there’s no way to sugarcoat Saturday: It was another disappointing performance in the Alabama-Georgia series that means the Tide remains Georgia’s Achilles heel. My intention is not to mount a defense of the staff’s recent missteps. Not kicking the field goal was an incredible mistake that very likely changed the outcome of the game, and I didn’t find Smart’s defense of the decision particularly persuasive. And he gets $13 million a year to deliver wins, not explanations of why things went wrong.
But I think it also speaks to how we can see the changes to college football’s broader ecosystem showing up in our own backyard. And I think it’s worth examining things closely.
History Lessons
As you might have inferred from my work here, in addition to being an avid Georgia fan and recreational sports blogger, I’m a professional historian. I’m interested in the cultural and literary history of England and Great Britiain in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was a period of rapid cultural, social, and scientific development, but it wasn’t always smooth or easy. Under Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled from 1558 to 1603, England had transformed itself from a relatively minor backwater in European politics into one of the preeminent players on the global stage. Her successor, James I, largely continued the successful administration of the state.
This period also saw a cultural flourishing. The works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Francis Bacon, and the King James-commissioned translation of the Bible as led by Lancelot Andrewes were all produced during this time. These works set the foundations for English literature and are still widely read today. You probably remember some of them from your own English classes.
Without going into unnecessarily minute detail, when James I died, his second son Charles became the king due to the untimely death of his older brother Henry. Charles was tempermentally ill-suited to ruling, and he hadn’t been effectively trained to be king since he was the younger son. His mismanagement and poor rule led to the end of the golden age of the English Renaissance, with the country eventually collapsing into civil war.
Generalizing about history often leads to sweeping oversimplifications, but we can see cycles like this one play out again and again. A period of abundance, security, and flourishing gives way to chaos and collapse.
But what comes after the collapse?
The Changing Landscape of College Football
The past quarter-century has been a fertile one for college football, with an explosion in offensive output and strategic innovations. The SEC has enjoyed a particularly incredible run, with Georgia starting this decade atop the sport’s hierarchy.
Two forces are radically reshaping the sport today, however. The first is the new era of player agency. Thanks to NIL, the transfer portal, and the recent House settlement, college football players now enjoy a level of autonomy they’ve never had before.
I support the players having more agency and player compensation, particularly their ability to profit off their own likenesses. Having watched Todd Gurley miss four critical games over an absolute nothingburger of an infraction radicalized me against the NCAA compensation rules, to say nothing of the AJ Green debacle.
I can also tell you from firsthand experience that the requirements of playing college football in 2025 are fundamentally incompatible with the notion of the student-athlete. I also find it hard to fault the players for wanting to maximize their earning potential since they know that college football is a multibillion dollar proposition. It’s only fair that the people assuming most of the risk and who do the bulk of the work get a cut of the action. Regardless of how you feel about it, though, I can’t imagine any future for the sport that manages to completely undo the transfer portal and increased player compensation.
The other entity disrupting is television, most clearly in the form of ESPN. Television broadcast rights are wildly lucrative: the rights for the College Football Playoff alone are worth $1.3 billion annually. And as people cut out cable and content providers all scramble to figure out what the future of television/streaming will look like, sports remains one of the most valuable properties because their value rests in live viewing.
The race to win more favorable television rights deals was the primary driver behind the recent realignment frenzy. It’s also driving playoff expansion and may possibly lead to the infusion of private equity cash into the sport. The powers that be — television executives, conference leadership, university presidents, boards, and athletic directors, among others — are attempting to remold college football into a national, unified sport in order to extract more profit from its broadcast. The ultimate goal is to create a superleague that has basically the structure of the NFC and AFC.
Contemporary college football evolved out of a patchwork of regional conferences. For more than its first century of existence, college football had no mechanism for determining an official champion, which is why schools can retroactively lay claim to titles they didn’t win. One of my favorite Georgia sports bloggers, Michael Brochstein, aka Senator Blutarsky, was fond of saying that college football’s appeal was its regionalism. As we move into the sport’s new era, we’re going to lose some of its essential character.
The Future Is Now
I’m not just weaving a sepia-toned reverie for the days of leather helmets. Romanticizing the past is easy. My point is that the job of a college football coach is fundamentally changing faster than the current practitioners can keep up with it.
Coaching college football at a high level is a hard, hard, hard job. You have to attract and develop players, manage a large and sprawling staff, design and implement playbooks, run practices and tape sessions, do specific game preparation, and then have the team ready to execute on game days. And to make it more difficult, your entire roster turns over every four years, give or take. You can’t lock up a star quarterback to a long-term deal because he’s eventually going to graduate.
It’s a miracle anyone has ever been successful doing it. And the bad news is that it’s going to get much harder.
In addition to all the traditional pressures of coaching, the transfer portal means coaches now also have to scout more heavily from players who are already in other programs. And they have to re-recruit their existing rosters each year to try to keep players onboard. Recruiting, which was already a full-time job itself and the cornerstone of building a winning program, is now significantly harder. Plus, you have to do all this with a hard cap on practice hours and with college students as your players.
Likewise, the path to a championship is more difficult now that it runs through a playoff. Instead of playing 12 to 15 games for a title, a team now has to play 17 and eventually perhaps 18. Football is a brutal sport, and adding more games to the schedule increases the likelihood of injuries and the difficulty of winning it all.
For all the talk of how the expanded playoff gives more teams a legitimate title shot, the winners are still likely going to come from the small subset of teams that have always competed regularly for championships. That’s because, even in the new system, the teams with the most depth will win out. The effect of the expanded playoff won’t be to anoint new teams as champion. More often than not, it will be to give blueblood programs a mulligan after taking a regular-season loss. After all, that’s exactly what happened last season.
Regardless of my feelings about increased player agency (generally pro) or the new, expanded post-season (generally anti) are irrelevant. As Olenna Tyrell said, “Once the cow’s been milked, there’s no squirting the cream back up her udder.” Too many people are making too much money off of the current setup to reverse course now.
And that’s going to require rethinking the job of the coach.
The Baroque Era Is Here
The English Civil Wars ended with King Charles I being executed and a period of military government. Even after the Restoration of the Stuart dynasty, the English monarchy never again had the absolute power it had enjoyed before. This change was reflected in the culture of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, with a darker, funnier, stranger culture emerging in the new era. This type of experimental, ornamental art is often called baroque.
The coaches who succeed in the changing era are going to be the ones who forge a baroque approach to the practice of coaching college football. This means taking the best aspects of what’s worked before and adapting them to the current landscape.
It’s just not going to be possible anymore to stockpile overwhelming amounts of talent. That also means player development will change since lots of guys aren’t going to spend multiple years within a system before seeing the field. Building a dynasty may not be possible anymore. If it is, it’s going to require more flexibility and imagination than before.
This is a Georgia blog, though, so let’s end with a look at the current state of affairs in Athens. I would argue that the coaching mistakes we’re seeing are, at least in part, a result of the intense pressures the staff is under as the traditional methods they’ve relied on are under threat.
Kirby Smart is an innovative X’s and O’s defensive mind, responsible for helping to build the pattern-matching scheme that slowed down the explosive spread attack that proliferated in the 2000s. But his greatest strength is in recruiting and player development. He stocked the roster with an overwhelming amount of talent, and he’s established an impressive developmental culture at Georgia. For instance, Jordan Davis was a three-star prospect, and Stetson Bennett went from a walk-on to the most decorated player in College Football Playoff history.
I have a non-UGA fan friend who loves to say that Geogia fans are so jittery that he’ll see us griping on social media about a game only to discover that we won by three scores. But blowing out an opponent has value from a developmental perspective. Once you get the game well in hand, you can rotate in younger players to give them live snaps against real competition.
That in-game experience is vital for the players’ growth and for retention. The more time guys see on the field, the likelier they are to stay. And the more guys you keep in the fold, the more you maintain the program’s culture and standards. Continuity is vital for year-over-year stability in a program.
Whatever you or I may think of the transfer portal, the reality is that Georgia’s roster is loaded with players that other schools would love to have.
Kirby Smart should be in the office in Butts-Mehre until he decides it’s time for something else. He is easily the most successful coach in school history, having won two titles in the hardest era to do so to date. Anyone who says otherwise is just incorrect. Personally, I don’t ever want to see anyone else on the sidelines on game days.
And if I can notice these things from my armchair, I feel confident Smart and the staff do too. But change takes time, and the sport is still in a good deal of flux. Often, you only know if a given decision or strategy is correct with the virtue of hindsight. I trust Smart to figure it out, but the early steps have been fitful.
I think it’s both right and prudent to ask hard questions after a loss. We need to see progress and a clear vision for where we’re headed. We have the infrastructure to compete for national titles every year, and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable expectation of the fanbase. But the era of undefeated regular seasons is probably in the rearview. As the coaches try to adjust the Georgia model of player development to suit the new era, we’re probably in for some agita.
What comes after a golden age ends? That’s what we’re trying to find out now.
