ATHENS, Ga. – University of Georgia head football coach Kirby Smart and select players offered the following comments during Monday’s press conference. The Bulldogs will open up the 2021 home season on Saturday against UAB at 3:30 p.m. ET.
Opening Statement…
“I was really proud of our players and the way they competed. We talked about composure and attention to detail, I thought we kicked butt in the composure department. We lost the attention to detail battle because we lost a couple of things. A big piece of communication for our guys moving forward is discipline. We talked about it today whether it is a noun or a verb, some of our players see it as what they do when they’re in trouble, others see it as doing what they’re supposed to do when they do it. We didn’t do that at a high enough level, we had a lot of bad disciplined eyes, decisions, blocks, really all over. You’d think it was just offense, that wasn’t the case. We had a lot of busts that we didn’t see that happened during the game. Defensively, that could have cost us or haunted us if we would have been exposed on it. Moving forward, we’re really concerned about that. Today is about UAB, we’ve got a lot of respect for their program. I was over there for years right by them, Bill Clark is a great coach and a close friend. He coached high school football and I recruited his school for a long time. He got into college coaching and has been very successful. They’ve done a tremendous job coaching and recruiting talent and winning football games. They’ve got a really good team, if you watch them on tape you’ll see it. When teams block punts and are good on special teams, you know they’re well coached. Our guys are really excited because it’s at home and it’ll be the first time we have a home atmosphere like we expect. So I’m looking forward to get ready for these guys.”
On Tate Ratledge and filling the guard position…
“We’ve had the luxury of having some depth. That’s one of our deepest positions on the team in terms of sheer scholarship numbers. Not necessarily talent, but sheer scholarship numbers we can use to move around. It’s very unfortunate for Tate, he’s done everything we’ve asked and he’s such a competitor. It’s going to be a tough four-to-five months for him, he’s going to work through it. Injuries happen in our game, it’s not the same injury as Darnell (Washington) or Tykee (Smith), but it’s still a tough injury. I’m hoping he gets back by spring ball to get back to work. As far as where we go from there, we have a couple of options. Jamaree (Salyer) has played at guard, we’ve got Owen Condon, Warren Ericson stepped in and did a tremendous job. Xavier Truss got up to play guard, we feel like Broderick (Jones) is at tackle ready to go and play. So we’ll have to wait and see. Jamaree took an extended amount of time and worked at guard and center while Warren was out. He did double duty tackle-center and we really wanted to do double duty tackle-guard. Now we’ll look at it if it’s Jamaree at guard, Broderick, Xavier at tackle or vice versa. We must do that, because if one guy goes down again it might be a different move. There’s no definitive answer, it’s this is what we’re looking at. We’ll look at Jamaree, Xavier both at guard-some, Warren and Owen will continue to play guard. The fear of having Warren and Sedrick in there, is they’re the two best centers. You’ve got a higher likelihood of losing one if they’re both playing, You can’t function without a center.”
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