Joshua L. Jones / USA TODAY NETWORK
Put on the headphones for this one.
We don’t often get to hear a pre-game speech from coaches. There are a ton of examples of the victory speech, but those come with the expectation that cameras will be there, so they’re sanitized. Georgia coach Kirby Smart didn’t know someone was recording his motivational speech to UGA ahead of the National Championship Game, and now it’s on the internet.
Normally I’d transcribe this for you, but frankly: There’s entirely too much swearing. It’s not that I clutch pearls around “naughty words,” and more that there’s only so many times I want to type out “f***, “f&^#ers” or “f*@%ing.”
The point is pretty clear here. Smart was saying that people were starting to doubt Georgia for no good reason. He felt the pregame talk had shifted to how, and why TCU was going to win when Georgia were still the big dogs in this fight.
One thing that really shined was how Smart wanted to bring all this back to simplicity. We so often overcomplicate the game of football at the expense of doing the little things right, and we’ve seen a lot of teams do this as well. It doesn’t need to be rocket science — just tackle well, make plays, and take everything one down at a time.
Georgia did just that, and now they’re back-to-back national champions because of it.