Georgia football is entering their third week of spring ball, and to no one's surprise, Kirby Smart is not happy with how spring ball has gone so far. To be fair, that is how every coach should be handling offseason practices because the last thing you want is your players to feel like they've already conquered the world in the spring.
But Smart's recent comments towards his freshman wide receivers was a little more than just keeping his guys focused. To put it simply, Smart was not happy with their lack of conditioning and with the shape that they are in right now.
"They've got to get in shape. They're constantly tired at practice. They've got their hands on their hips, exhausted."
This message is clearly very powerful, but Smart did backtrack from what he said.
"I want to be clear. I'm not calling out the freshmen receivers for not being in shape. I'm calling out all the freshmen. We're not in shape," Smart shared via 247sports.com. "There's not a guy out there, a freshman, that is sustaining his reps and just flourishing. They’re not used to the tempo of practice, nor should they be. There's not a high school program in the country that can practice like we do. So the number of reps and the tempo of the reps... they might take the same numbers in practice but they took it (in high school) over three hours. They're taking them in an hour and 40 minutes, that same repetition."
Smart thinks this is normal
Instead of calling out just the freshman wide receivers, Smart changed his mind and called out all of the freshman for not being in shape. But at the same time, he acknowledged that no freshman will ever be 100 percent prepared for practice at Georgia fresh out of the high school.
The obvious hope now is that these freshmen will get caught up to speed in a hurry. And based on how passionate Smart appears to be about this, it likely won’t take much time at all.