Georgia head coach Kirby Smart met with the media on Tuesday at the SEC Spring Meetings in Destin, Florida. He spoke about a range of topics, including gambling, the recruiting budget, and the idea that Georgia’s surpassed Alabama.
Here’s everything Smart said:
On Georgia’s recruiting budget…
“I think there’s a little misnomer to that. You’d have to really study the numbers, and I don’t know how much you guys dig into accounting methods but we don’t have a school plane – let’s start with that. If somebody has a school plane, let’s say they take 100 flights in that plane, they’re not counting those 100 flights. We might make 100 flights that we purchase, so our recruiting numbers are imbalanced based on that. Now, do we spend on recruiting? Absolutely. The SEC schools spend on recruiting. Is it necessary to be competitive? It is, and our administration has been great about supporting us. The numbers that people put out, some of those are eye-popping and catching where some people are counting their numbers a lot differently, especially with flights which is our No. 1 expense.”
“I don’t know that, I want to be efficient, and we make decisions and we’re conscious of budgets and we try to be smart so I’m not trying to sit here and — we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to compete.”
On tampering as an issue in recruiting…
“Look, I’m not one that gets deep into these issues. People have hot-button topics that they want to talk about, they’ve got a word that they want to talk about. I think tampering’s been going on for a long time. It’s probably more prevalent because it’s so much easier to transition from one school to another by way of the portal. So look, if kids are exploring to leave, it’s really hard to police. Ask the NCAA. If a kid goes to his trainer or high school coach, well, in our program we have people talking to those trainers and high school coaches. Word of mouth spreads that a guy’s not happy and he’s looking. Next thing you know he’s in the portal and he’s already got somewhere that he wants to go. I don’t really get caught up. in it. I worry a lot more about my roster and say ‘How do we manage the people that we have so that they don’t want to go somewhere else?’ I focus on that, not – a lot of these teams have people on their staff that go out and watch the opposing team on the field to write down how they look, how they run. They’re surveying the field for the portal. We’re not that elaborate. We’re going to try to focus on our guys, and retention is probably more important to me.”
