Nick Patterson

Kirby Smart says the best coaches don’t hope for toughness from their team, they demand it everyday in practice “I asked them that the other day in a team meeting. I said, ‘Guys, what’s different about us?’ There’s been a better energy in practices this year. There’s been a little bit more buy-in. The leadership has held people a little more accountable.” “We’ve run the ball and stopped the run better. And I said, ‘Why have we done that?’ They said, ‘Well, we made it a point of emphasis, Coach. Y’all said we had to do this. We had to be able to run the ball and we have to be able to stop the run.’ And we have.” “Last year was a little bit different for Georgia. It was an outlier because we weren’t real good at it. We showed the stats every week in the offseason. We rubbed their nose in it.” “We made a committed effort in the offseason to say, instead of doing one-on-one pass every day at our light practices, we’re going to do run drills. We’re going to block fronts. We’re going to block stunts and movement.” “We’re going to really work on stopping the run and running the ball, even if we’re not in pads. And then when we put pads on in the spring, we’re going to do a little more run emphasis. We’re going to throw less RPOs when we run.” “We’re going to commit to saying, ‘The people are in the box, and you’ve got to block them. You can’t just find ways around it.’ And I think you get what you demand in this world, and you get what you demand in this game. We probably demanded it more. It wasn’t that the last group was not capable. We probably didn’t demand it at that standard.”