Vicky Graff Photo
Georgia coach Kirby Smart basically said “I told you so” after his team barely survived against Kentucky Saturday night and escaped with a 13-12 win to keep its four-year regular-season winning streak alive.
“I think I’ll open with an immense amount of respect for Coach (Mark) Stoops. The atmosphere, the culture he created here. I tried to tell everybody all week, nobody listened to me,” Smart said after the game. “I know what this team’s made out of, I know how tough he coaches, I know several coaches on the staff, I’ve known them for a long time. I have tremendous respect.
“When they get disrespected like they did last week and they listen to it for a week, they come out ready to play. I think our kids listen to that; they understood it but also think it’s a tough environment to play in. So proud of the resiliency our kids showed. They never flinched. We thought this would be a blow-by-blow game. We talked all week about blow-by-blow, we had more blows than them.
“And we said that the first chop of the tree doesn’t chop the tree down, it takes sometimes two other sets and two axes. It took every single one tonight to get the job done.”
Smart credited his team’s leadership and team culture for not panicking when UK had the lead and had chances to win and pull off a huge upset.
“I saw more leadership tonight than I’ve seen all season. And you guys asked me a thousand questions about this team this, this team this, I don’t know much about this team, but I found out more tonight than I’ve known them this morning. That makes me extremely proud of how they responded, how they handled some difficult situations,” Smart said.
The Georgia coach, who considers Stoops a good friend, knew Kentucky’s defense was good despite the 31-6 loss to South Carolina.
“I mean say what you want about Kentucky’s defense, but Kentucky’s defense is pretty good to me. We’ll judge that at the end of the year, and I think people are looking at that the wrong way of the South Carolina game. I think Kentucky has a really good defense,” Smart said.
