ATHENS - It is one of the important questions of the college football season for any team or program - and that’s certainly the case for Georgia football this week.
Did Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs do enough to help themselves in the off week? The 11th-year head coach talks about what his team needs to do as they enter the stretch run of the 2026 season.
Recover and conditioning
As Smart has discussed a lot lately, the Bulldogs’ injury list is starting to pile up. Gunner Stockton, KJ Bolden, Nate Frazier, Isiah Canion, Chauncey Bowens and other have been dealing with injuries that have effected them by either missing games or playing through pain.
“I certainly hope we can manage the coming weeks with our players’ health well,” Smart said this week. “It seems that we’re more beat up than we’ve been in the past when I send in injury reports. That’s not because we’re doing more. We’re doing less, but it’s just a tough gauntlet of games and even more to come.”
Smart said the Dawgs needed to handle the off week the right way in order to get those in Silver Britches as healthy as possible for the final five regular-season games of the year.
“We have different guys in different spots that all need different things,” he added.
Getting Better
There’s no question that a break during a long season is a good thing. But Smart said Georgia can’t stand still while taking the week off.
"Recover and conditioning level and getting healthy would be one answer, but getting better would another answer. Those two don’t necessarily coexist well,” he admitted. “You have to be careful about who you’re talking about. Is it a fourth-year player? Is it a fifth-year player? Is it a guy that’s beat up because he’s played a bunch of snaps versus a guy that hasn’t? You’re trying to gain those inches we just talked about in those margins. We’re really prescribing this week for each player what they can get better at, what they can improve on. Some of that is conditioning, some of that is health, some of that is reps and some of it is situational football. We have different guys in different spots that all need different things.”
Experienced players like Frazier, Bolden and Canion might need a simple refresh to get going again. They’ve all proven what they can do over the last few years. Getting them back to the field as fast as possible at their peak production is key to the remainder of the season.
But backups that have limited playing time and experience have to continue to develop. This is the week of the year that a young Jordan Davis starting playing significant minutes during his freshman season. Could someone emerge that we’ve not seen play a ton this season so far?
Time will tell.
No certain answer
Smart knows well that the bye week means different things for different players. Stockton’s off week is going to be different than reserve signal caller Ryan Montgomery, for example. Smart pointed out that the Bulldogs have a specific play for each of the players on the roster.
“I think every team is different when it comes to a bye-week. If you asked what’s the number one thing that we can get out of the bye-week, there’s a bunch of things,” Smart said. "It depends on who you’re asking. Are you asking about which player?”
The Bulldogs are set to play the Gators in Atlanta Saturday on ABC.
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