UGA Football: Kirby Smart Talks About the Off the Field Driving Issues at SEC Media Days
The head coach of the top program in the country is obviously disappointed in the incidents that have taken place, but they haven’t happened due to lack of trying to help and guide the players:
“I always talk about process and outcomes. I talk about that in wins and losses, that we try not to base things on the outcomes in wins and losses. In this situation, the outcomes are very disappointing. Our process and the things we’ve put in place, I feel very strongly about,” Smart said. “We do as much or more education than anybody in the country. We have discipline in the form of suspensions and we will continue to do so. We’ll have suspensions coming out of some of these. We had them last year with the Marcus Rosemy situation. We’ve also had to let guys go based on them.”
Most of you have seen enough from Kirby Smart by now to know that he isn’t going to talk too much about suspensions and discipline:
“I don’t necessarily think it’s right to go down to the town square and publicly shame kids when that happens. They go through a lot, and there’s a lot of remorse from these young men who made mistakes,” Smart said. “Our job is to educate and continue to grow these young men.”
“Everybody wants to know what game and are they suspended. That’s probably not the most important thing in terms of the discipline and culture they’ve got to experience. As far as I know, there’s not one team that has ever suspended a player for a traffic violation. That’s what Marcus Rosemy got suspended for. I don’t know that anybody has kicked anybody off the team for that, and we have that,” he continued. “We’re going to continue to be proactive. It’s repeated behaviors that will get you dismissed. Repeated poor behaviors and poor decisions. In some cases we have repeated behaviors. In some cases, we have guys that make mistakes. We’re gonna punish them.”