Mark Ingram shares how he would have reacted if Kirby Smart shoved him

Out of all of the public reactions to Kirby Smart shoving Mississippi State QB Michael Van Buren during Georgia’s game last week, this is one of the more intriguing ones to me.

Former Alabama running back Mark Ingram just shared his opinion on the matter. The reason why his statement grabbed my attention is because Ingram knows Smart extremely well. Smart was the defensive coordinator at Alabama when Ingram played there, so his opinion of Smart is a little more valuable to me than others.

But that’s part of the reason why Ingram’s statement on the subject is so wild to me.

Mark Ingram’s Reaction

“I know Kirby perfectly,” Ingram said via ‘The Triple Option’ podcast. “He was my defensive coordinator when I was at Alabama, and he knows if he would have touched any one of us alphas like that, then he would have been squared up on. If he would have tried to push Rolando McClain, Courtney Upshaw, them cats like that. Me or Julio Jones, I would have been trying to get at Kirby.”

Does anyone actually believe this? I know I don’t. Yes players of “fight” in practice which usually resemble shoving matches more than anything else, but do I think Ingram would’ve gone after Smart if he shoved him? Not even for a second. Mainly because I know how tight of a ship Nick Saban ran at Alabama, everyone would’ve known that would be way over the line.

But at the end of the day, it’s easy to have these feelings days later when you aren’t the ones involved. It’s easy to have this reaction after watching the replay hundreds of times in slow-mo where everything looks worse than it actually is. But in the heat of the moment, when all you’re thinking about is what play you’re running next, I don’t think you would pause and go after a coach for doing this. Especially when in real time it looked like Smart didn’t even see Van Buren for a second.

So to me, this statement looks more like an attempt to make a statement that garners national attention rather than what Ingram actually would have done.