Kirby Smart and Georgia flip the page from national title. ‘We will not be hunted at UGA’

BY MARC WEISZER • ATHENS BANNER-HERALD

ATLANTA — In a quiet moment before the hustle and bustle of making the rounds for hours Wednesday morning at SEC Media Days, Kirby Smart declared himself “caffeine activated.”

Smart is about the last one that would be considered needing a jolt of energy, but winning a national championship has the danger of making one fat and happy.

Especially since Smart just led Georgia to the promised land of a national title for the first time in 41 years.

“I’m not wired that way,” Smart said. “I’m wired to worry the day after the game about who we were going to sign. I kind of told our team when we came back, I said, ‘Look guys, I believe in these mind tricks where when people tell you something it triggers something.’ Every time someone tells me congrats on the national championship — and there have been a gazillion of those — I tell myself each week, this week I’m going to call three more recruits. Next week, I’m going to think about what we can do on third down better.”

So he asks his players like a motivational speaker, “What have you done today to be better for tomorrow?”

Now Smart is entering his seventh season as head coach looking for more.

“People ask the question, ‘How does it feel to be hunted?’ ” Smart said. “We will not be hunted at the University of Georgia. I can promise you that. The hunting we do will be from us going the other direction. We’re not going to sit back and be passive.”

Smart spoke 190 days after Georgia won the national title on the night of Jan. 10 by slaying Alabama.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who had both the winning and losing team in the game in Indianapolis, was struck by Smart’s postgame moment.

“I’ve never seen a head coach running up and chest bumping people as much as Kirby did after the victory,” Sankey said. “He started to do the same with me. I looked at him and say, ‘If you do that to me, you’ll probably knock me down and hurt me.’ We had a handshake moment.”

Neither Smart nor any of the three Georgia player representatives sported their national championship rings on Wednesday at the College Football Hall of Fame.

“Absolutely not,” center Sedrick Van Pran-Granger said when asked if he had any thoughts of flashing the bling for the cameras Wednesday. “That’s something I feel personally I can look at when I’m done at the University of Georgia.”

In an area out of public view inside the Omni Hotel before they each took the stage Wednesday morning, Kirby Smart and former Bulldogs offensive line coach Sam Pittman gave each other big