Kirby Smart wants little fires everywhere to come together as Bulldogs focus on their ‘DNA’ for 2025 season through fall camp
Kirby Smart is focused on getting the young players back to playing for the love of the game as opposed to a paycheck.
Fall camp is underway in Athens, which means the kickoff for the Georgia Bulldogs’ 2025 college football season is almost here.
With 13 Bulldogs players drafted this past April, Kirby Smart‘s team is relatively young, but he loves what that means for his team this fall.
“Energy, enthusiasm, non-complacency,” Smart said on the benefits of coaching a younger group. “That’s not to label old teams. Ask that, but you don’t have that problem with young teams.”
Smart’s new, yet old, mantra for the upcoming seasons is “fire, passion, and energy.” To Smart, that means he’s focused on getting the young players back to playing for the love of the game as opposed to a paycheck. He refers to it as the team’s ‘DNA.’
“Yeah, it’s a big part of what we do,” Smart said. “It just came from feeling like we had four DNA traits, and we stuck with those for three or four years, and we still got them. But we felt like of the four DNA traits we had those, we checked the box on all four every year, but there was something missing, and we felt like maybe that was what was missing, and maybe that’s missing all over college football, or not all over just in pockets. And if you don’t have that, then you may not have success. So we wanted to reward it, talk about it, and make it a DNA trait, because it wasn’t in our DNA traits before.”
Now, what do those DNA traits look like on and off the field?
“Relentless effort, connection, rewarding a teammate, hand on a helmet, body language,” Smart said. “You know, it’s more than just how you play. It’s what you do between the snaps.”
This isn’t anything new for Smart, but after watching little fires burn everywhere year after year, he’s ready for one big flame.
“No, I don’t know it was lacking in previous years,” Smart said. “I just know that we want it and more rewarding. We’ve always had some form of it, but it’s the analogy of small campfires. You can have all these little, small campfires, or you can have a burning inferno. And we want a burning inferno. We want all those campfires to come together and be 11 burning fires, not a couple little burning bushes over here and over there.”
We’ll see how bright this younger Georgia team can burn when their season officially kicks off on August 30 against Austin Peay.
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