Field Street Forum

ATHENS, Ga. – University of Georgia head coach Kirby Smart and select players offered the following comments from Monday morning’s press conference. The Bulldogs will head to Nashville, Tennessee this week to face off against Vanderbilt on Saturday at 12 p.m. ET. This is the first meeting between the Commodores and Bulldogs since the 2019 season.

Head Coach Kirby Smart
Opening statement… 
“I hope we can continue to do this and looking forward to having you all today. I warn you, be careful today because we’re probably having to go inside due to the rain, so it’s going to be a very confined space for us, it’s really tight out there, so you’d be on your own. I’m excited to get to work on these guys, you know, we didn’t get to play them last year with the COVID-19 kind of experience we had. Headed to Nashville where our fan base always does a tremendous job and turns out, so excited about that. We’ll have to prepare for an early preparation, because it’s very, very different when you have pregame meal at possibly 7,7:30, so that’ll be different for us. One of the things I forgot to mention is excited about the ‘Dawgs On Tour’ and the money that our pro golfers are raising—I want to give some awareness to that and those guys are challenging everybody to make pledges for the number of birdies they make—so somebody told me I need to make a pledge, so I’m pledging one dollar per birdie for those guys. You don’t think it’d be much, but somebody told me that could get anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000, but those guys are giving back to the university and I think it’s great. Anybody that plays here, as an amateur, and then goes on to become a professional and be able to give back, which those pro golfers have done, I think it’s a tremendous honor for them to do that and want to help out with that.”

On Sedrick Van Pran…
“Sedric is a guy who we’ve always thought was really talented and we went and recruited him out of New Orleans. He’s got a wonderful family and he’s got relatives right in the Cobb County area that have come to games. I know his family comes up and stays. So he’s an exciting—really a great kid—very, very sharp kid who processes information really well, makes decisions and protections, makes points, does a lot of good things for our team. I think his growth was fast-forwarded through Warren (Ericson) being injured He would have gone a lot with the two’s anyway, but he got thrown in with the one’s, got a lot of good work in, and grew, and got better. His accuracy with snaps has continued to improve and must continue to stay at a high rate because the number one thing to success from an offense is number one, getting the snap, and he’s done a nice job of that. He’s had a couple, you know, plays in each game that make you go ‘What were you thinking there?’ He’s got to get those out, you can’t have—you may get beat physically and then very rarely does he get beat physically, but he can’t have mental lapses or, you know, do things on your own, and I think that part he’s still a work in progress, but I love his work ethic, I love the way he practices and leads and you can tell he’s going to be the kind of guy that leads in the right direction for the future for this team.”

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