Kirby Smart issues apology to Jake Pope

It appears the Jake Pope saga from this past weekend is finally coming to an end.

The defensive back was unfortunately caught celebrating with Ole Miss fans on the field directly after Georgia football suffered their 28-10 defeat to the Rebels on Saturday. As one would imagine, the college football world erupted as this was an extremely bad look for Pope.

Pope later came out and explained his side of the story, which involved him being excited seeing his family friends on the field. But still, the video itself looked very bad. So much so that Kirby Smart called Pope an “idiot” during his Monday press conference.

Fast forward to Tuesday and Smith was asked about this issue again, and Smart shared the below apology regarding what he said about Pope on Monday.

“Yeah, you know, I don't like to comment on the internal stuff going on inside,” Smart said via 247Sports.com. “He did talk to the team, did a great job. I'll say I should not have called the kid an idiot. That was a mistake by me. But I appreciate Jake. He's a great kid. He works really hard. He's a team player. I think he knows it was an emotional mistake. And he told the team that. So, I appreciate the way he handled it."

Smart apologizes to Pope

Based on the above quote from Smart, you can see that he feels bad for calling Pope an idiot. It does appear Smart is still upset about the incident, but he does feel bad for using the words that he did on Monday, especially in such a public setting.

Another thing that’s nice to hear is that Pope addressed this incident with the entire team. It originally seemed unlikely that Pope would ever be able to earn his teammates trust back after this video surfaced, but Pope’s apology to the entire team should go a long way.

Hopefully Georgia is able to move past this moment now, because they have a massive game in front of them. No. 7 Tennessee is coming to Athens on Saturday, and this is a must win game considering Georiga fell all the way to No. 12 in the updated College Football Playoff rankings.

If Smart and the team are able to move past this then the fanbase should as well. So it’s time for everyone ti move on and get focused on the big game this weekend.