Kirby Smart rarely expresses strong opinions in public. On Saturday, he did. He stood atop the figurative stump with a megaphone after his sixth-ranked Georgia Bulldogs destroyed No. 5 Florida State 63-3 in the Orange Bowl on Saturday night.
“Let me say something,” he offered without prompting at the end of his 20-minute postgame press conference at Hard Rock Stadium. “I may be wrong here and maybe this will be a bad sound bite, but people need to see what happened tonight and they need to fix this. It needs to be fixed. It’s very unfortunate that (FSU), who has a good team and a good football program, is in the position they’re in. Everybody can say it’s their fault and it’s their own problem, all right? And everybody can say we had our guys and they didn’t have our guys. I can listen to all that. But college football has got to decide what they want.”
It wasn’t exactly a drop-mic moment, but it came from a three-minute diatribe the Bulldogs’ eighth-year coach went on at the end of the postgame question-and-answer session that also involved players Kendall Milton and Kamari Lassiter. He dove-tailed from college football’s problems into what was right about Milton and Lassiter, both of who chose to opt-in rather than opt-out for the Orange Bowl.
The primary difference in the Seminoles and the Bulldogs in Saturday’s game was at least 24 FSU players either opted out due to the inherent risks to their prospective NFL careers or to enter the transfer. But Georgia dealt with some of those issues as well. About 20 Bulldogs have entered the portal since it opened on Dec. 4, with more expected to join before the transfer window closes on Jan. 3.
The difference was the roles the departees played before they left. For the Bulldogs it mostly was players who didn’t play prominent roles. For FSU, it was seemingly everybody who did. Twelve Seminole starters did not participate. A couple of those, including star quarterback Jordan Travis, were sidelined with injuries. The reserves who needed to step up in their absence simply weren’t up to the task.
“I take full ownership for all things that happened on that field tonight,” FSU coach Mike Norvell said, choking back emotion. “We have plenty of opportunities to grow.”
There probably would have been far fewer opt-outs for both teams had they been included in the College Football Playoff. Both would have been had the 12-team playoff began this year. But, ironically, FSU and its ACC brethren formed an alliance with two other leagues to protest the expansion, which delayed it a year. Next year, the playoff officially expands to 12 teams. But for the other 121 teams that don’t get in, the portal and opting-out of bowl games will continue to be a debilitating issue for college football’s postseason.
“I know things are going to change next year,” Smart said from the postgame podium. “You know what? There’s going to still be bowl games outside of those. People got to decide what they want and what they really want to get out of it, because it’s really unfortunate for those kids on that sideline that had to play in that game that didn’t have their full arsenal, and it affected the game, 100%.”
The difference was depth and attitude. Georgia was much better on both. Here are five more things we learned from Saturday’s game: Bowers’ farewell It turned out that Brock Bowers played his last game as a Bulldog in the SEC Championship game on Dec. 2.
