ATHENS – UGA Football coach Kirby Smart said Monday that he’s eager to see what the No. 3 Dawgs will do when they tackle someone other than themselves.
Smart was asked specifically about younger players in his program getting major action this weekend, and he said he was interested to see how they will play.
“They have to go out and react to an opponent,” Smart said of inexperienced players on the roster. “Somebody that you don’t always know exactly what they’re going do.”
Georgia has been practicing the last 26 days to get ready for the season, which has given some young players time to acclimate to college football. In addition, the Dawgs will get two warm-up games, so to speak, before heading to Arkansas to start the SEC season on September 19th.
The 11th-year coach said he didn’t want to undervalue what the program had been doing during what has been an abnormally hot August in Athens.
“I put value on scrimmages, so I don’t know that I can say any game rep is more valuable than the first two scrimmage reps we had,” Smart told reporters of younger players. “I put value on everything we do and try to put them in game-like situations because game-like situations matter. So I don’t want to devalue what we’ve done or devalue what we’re going to do in this game, but they just need reps.”
Games against Tennessee State and Western Kentucky offer Smart and his coaching staff the chance to rotate players at key positions, the most-watched of which is likely backup quarterback.
Ryan Puglisi and Ryan Montgomery have been neck and neck in that competition – something that Smart said could continue into the season.
“That battle’s not over,” Smart said. “It’s one of those things that we will continue to see and inevitably you would like to see it play out in live action. But is that live action through us or is that live action through a game? I don’t know if we’ll get a chance to do that.”
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