Smart, Players Discuss The Bye Week

GEORGIA FOOTBALL VIDEOS

Coach Smart

L. Humphreys

K. Barnes

ATHENS, Ga. – Georgia football head coach Kirby Smart, senior safety Khalil Barnes and senior wide receiver London Humphreys spoke with the media on Tuesday and offered the following comments.

Head Coach Kirby Smart
Opening Statement
"We've started getting ourselves better, doing a lot of looking within, self-scouting. They have a lot of goals for this week. We had the players in yesterday and got some good rehab in, got some walk-through in and then we'll practice today, tomorrow and again on Thursday before we give them a much-needed break. Then, we'll get ready to come back and start up on Florida next week."

On the miscommunication on the field goal in the second quarter…
"We do that every day at practice … We work that in terms of speeding things up and trying to make sure we go quickly. Gunner [Stockton] thought we were punting and just came off the field because it was a little bit longer of a field goal, but I've never thought to burn the timeout for me because I don't really believe in burning timeouts when you need them for extra possessions. I regret using the timeout for the fourth-and-four with the hard count, but we felt like that one was worth it because the win was in our face. The win was with us on his kick, so we decided not to use it. We do have those hurried kicks in everyday practice, so I feel good about that."

On the performance on special teams this season…
"It's really hard because you don't get many opportunities to impact the game. We've talked about it for three weeks. There's hardly any kickoff returns in our conference because the kickers are so good at kicking them out, so kickoff return gets negated. Now, a couple teams have, and you can say, 'Well, Tyriq Green ran a touchdown,' but it wasn't in SEC play. Then you go to punt returns, and across the league, there's not a lot of punt return opportunities in SEC versus SEC play. Then it's like, 'How do I flip a field?'  The best way to flip a field is to have an elite punter that hits bombs. Our offense has been pretty efficient, and we haven't had a lot of punts. We've had a lot inside 50, what you call pooch punt opportunities. That's been the biggest weakness. We have not pinned people inside their 10 at the rate that we would like to, and that's probably the most glaring. There's a lot of special teams stats that are just misleading because this is where you are with kickoff coverage, this is where you with kickoff return, but they're miniscule because you don't get opportunities. You only get two or three returns every five weeks."

On QB Gunner Stockton's condition…
"He has not had any concussion symptoms. I can only go off of what medical people tell me. Looking at him in the eye and talking to him, there was no issue on any of that. Now, he did have a stinger in his shoulder, and that can affect you. That's hard. That's what linebackers get. That's what Ja'Marley [Riddle] got. That's what a lot of players get, but you bounce back from those quickly. I think everyone's making speculations, but the guy played really good against Alabama. He could have very easily had two interceptions. He had one and the other was debatable. He played pretty good and had two interceptions. He still did some really good things in that game, and I don't think that making it about a head injury when there's no symptoms of that are realistic."

On losses from five of the top seven teams this weekend…
"I'd say that it's a new day and age. It's easy to use the word parity. I think everybody's used that. Anybody can beat anybody on a given Saturday in the world we live in now. Everybody has good players, everybody's diversifying. The amount of talent spreads itself out because kids want to play and kids want to get paid, and starters get paid. More players go to more places, and there's just more parity. I think you're going to see more of that. It's actually going to be who deals with it best. Who can manage and deal with this best? You can say that a team's used to having three, four, five losses. They deal with it better than a team that's used to having one, two, three losses, and we have to do a good job of managing that and dealing with it because the margins are just tighter."

On the defensive performance this season…
"I want to see growth in a lot of areas with our whole team. You can start with special teams, you can start offensively, whether it's explosives. We can get better at everything we do. We don't look at it and say, 'Well, we're first in red zone offense. We don't need to improve on that.' That would a terrible thing to say. I think that the biggest thing on defense, frustration-wise, has been red zone defense because the stats say that you're not good. Sometimes the stats can lie because we had two plays the other day that were kind of freaky plays, a halfback pass that's double covered. It just boils down to making the play right. We covered it and did everything right. I made an unbelievable play, and then there was the fade catch. You make people run it on you, you don't let them throw it in on you, and that's usually what we're really good at, which is stopping people on the run and doing those things. We've had two times in the red area because when we go back and study, where was the breakdown? It ends up being a D.P.I. high in the red area that ends up putting people at first and goal. If you win any one of those matchups, your numbers can change and be skewed. It's not a schematic issue, it's just playing better and making more timely plays in the red area. We have been more productive in sacks. One of the glaring things to us is we want to tackle better. We're high in missed tackles than we have been in years past, and that's a big target area for us. We think that missed tackles are up as a whole across college football, so we're not immune to that. We're part of that problem, but how do we do it better than they do? That's really what we're trying to do this week. How can we get better incrementally and gain inches when the margins are tighter? The inches are everywhere."

On the confidence in QB Ryan Puglisi…
"That's why he practices. He goes out there every day and takes his reps. He takes much less than Gunner, but he was a part of the plan on all those plays. He sat in the meeting on those plays. I don't that when that happens, you can just shut down and say, 'I have to change the plan.' That was the plan in those situations. One was second-and-medium or long, and then the other was third-and-short, and the other one was first-and-10. He managed those situations really well, and it's the reason we practice him is so that he's able to go in and do what he does well."

On what makes a good bye week for a team…
"I think every team is different when it comes to a bye-week. If you asked what's the number one thing that we can get out of the bye-week, there's a bunch of things. It depends on who you're asking. Are you asking about which player? Recover and conditioning level and getting healthy would be one answer, but getting better would another answer. Those two don't necessarily coexist well. You have to be careful about who you're talking about. Is it a fourth-year player? Is it a fifth-year player? Is it a guy that's beat up because he's played a bunch of snaps versus a guy that hasn't? You're trying to gain those inches we just talked about in those margins. We're really prescribing this week for each player what they can get better at, what they can improve on. Some of that is conditioning, some of that is health, some of that is reps and some of it is situational football. We have different guys in different spots that all need different things."

On roster management and player health for the remainder of the season…
"I certainly hope we can manage the coming weeks with our players' health well. It seems that we're more beat up than we've been in the past when I send in injury reports. That's not because we're doing more. We're doing less, but it's just a tough gauntlet of games and even more to come."

On the 24-team playoff…
"I think only time will tell. Who knows how this thing is going to turn out in our league, but I think that among the coaches, we all agree that it's brutal, it's a gauntlet. It's already the fastest it's ever been, in terms of every SEC team having a loss. What does that trajectory look like in four to five weeks or six weeks? I don't even know how many more weeks. But is it going to be the SEC champion with three? Is it going to be two? I don't know. I just know that on any give Saturday, somebody can get their butt beat in our league. The 24-team playoff is just going to extend it longer. You'd like to think that it gives more teams access and opportunity, but at the end of the day, there'll be a lot of teams in really tight margins and there'll be those arguments. They are every year. The argument is going to be from number 20 to 28 instead of number eight to 16. There's going to be overlap there."

On the group of players from first season at Georgia in 2016…
"I saw some of those guys at the game. It was weird because I saw Nick [Chubb], Sony [Michel] and Isaiah McKenzie for the first time in forever. It was just great to see them come back because I love those guys. They probably went through the toughest year here, at least since I've been here, and it was tough on them. Ultimately, they won games before I came. It wasn't like they weren't winning. We didn't play to the standard of what Georgia is now that year. We struggled. We practiced at a different facility. It was a wild year altogether, but I really appreciate that group because I've kept in touch with a lot of them. They come around, and they were the first to really believe in what we were doing, especially that second year. It wasn't always easy."

On DB KJ Bolden's injury…
"He was not dealing with anything before the Alabama game. He actually cramped around halftime, on the touchdown score right before the half. Then had an injury that came up towards the end around the sack which he never had to go back in because we ended up keeping the ball during that time. In terms of him coming back, he's hopeful. We're hopeful to get him back. I don't know what. I'm going to have to see. He's just got to recover and go through the doctor's protocol."

On decision making around RB Bo Walker…
"Bo's doing a great job. Bo works his tail off, had a good week of practice, worked really hard and took advantage of some good opportunities against Alabama. This game, Nate [Frazier] was back, healthy, playing. It didn't help any that, you know, we fell behind at some point and got behind and trying to play catch-up some and Nate and Dwight [Phillips Jr.] are both really good in the pass game and do a good job and those were the guys we were going with. It was nothing that Bo did wrong or right or indifferent, it was an opportunity for Nate to come back."

On linebacker performance...
"I think some of that is situational and based on the team we play. They were obviously a run-first team and a quarterback-run team with a really big, physical quarterback. Those guys have the best opportunities to make those tackles because they're the most built like him, 230 or 240 pounds. All three of those guys are right at that weight, so they end up being the guys that get them. Some of those tackles they got were because the other guys didn't make the tackle, and that's not always a good thing. When the back end misses it or can't get them down, and that's what I am talking about with the missed tackles, those guys end up finishing it off. If they are making the tackles five, seven, or ten yards downfield, that is not a good sign."

On the wide receiver group...
"As a whole, that group was the one everyone wanted to question or say things about coming in. Talyn's [Taylor] grown up a lot, and he's made a lot of plays for us. He's really been a consistent guy that practices hard, plays hard, gets open, and wins one-on-one opportunities. London [Humphreys] continues to improve and get better. We've been injured probably as much at that position as we have any. Throw the wide receivers in there with the running backs, and it's a tough combination that Coach Bobo and the offensive staff have had to work through. I've been really pleased with the receiver group as a whole. There are a couple guys that you don't get to see, and that haven't played as much that get really good work in practice and have been coming alone and doing good things that we hope to see this week."

University of Georgia Athletics

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Khalil Barnes

KJ Bolden

Tyriq Green

London Humphreys

Ryan Puglisi

Gunner Stockton

Bo Walker

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