What Kirby Smart liked, and didn’t like, in Georgia’s second football scrimmage

Georgia isn’t there yet.

When Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart met with reporters Saturday after the second scrimmage of fall camp, he didn’t seem to be in the best of moods. Soon enough he revealed why: He expected his team to take a jump forward in scrimmage number two, but it didn’t materialize like he hoped.

“It was sloppy,” Smart said. “We had a lot of penalties and we didn’t tackle real well, didn’t play real well in the red area on defense. Both sides of the ball kind of, when we went ones on twos, overpowered the other one, with the ones on ones being a little more balanced.”

Georgia ran about 135 to 140 plays, with increased emphasis placed on second-and-10 and goal-line situations. The players fared better physically with Saturday’s cooler temperature. Just like scrimmage one, however, Smart felt the execution was lacking.

Here’s what else the Georgia head coach had to say after scrimmage number two:

Defense guarding against complacency

Georgia’s defense enters the 2020 campaign with lofty expectations. So far in scrimmages that has largely played out, with the unit dominating the second-team offense.

The starters-on-starters periods, however, were more balanced. The first-team offense had the upper hand in second-and-10 and red zone scenarios, while the starting defense had control of situations where the goal was simply to move the ball down the field. Smart also said there were a couple nice interceptions Saturday, fitting in well with the team’s goal of creating havoc.

It’s hard enough to keep a group engaged when they’ve only competed against their teammates in camp. Add to that the praise the defensive Bulldogs have been hearing, and there can come a tendency to let up.

Smart wants to make sure that doesn’t happen. Whether through competition or just challenging his group to outperform themselves, he wants the defense to constantly strive to be the best it can be.

“I certainly am concerned about complacency there and making sure they’re competing and staying on top of things because we’ve got a chance to be a talented group,” Smart said.

Bulldogs spared from COVID-19, for now

Georgia’s SEC rival Auburn was in the news this week after head coach Gus Malzahn revealed that 16 players would sit out of practice due to COVID-19 quarantine protocols. Tennessee on Saturday was down 44 players, coach Jeremy Pruitt said, with seven or eight positive COVID cases and an unannounced number of Vols quarantined because of contact tracing. (The Vols also had some players out with injuries.)

So far the Bulldogs have been spared such a coronavirus impact, at least as far as the world outside of Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall knows. Still, Smart knows that catastrophic scenario is never far away.

“It’s just scary that at any given time, it could hit your team and you could not have enough guys to practice and get better,” Smart said. “It just seems like it’s a matter of, if it’s going to hit you before this game or that game. It seems to be going around the league.”

Smart didn’t know of anything the Bulldogs have done differently to stay safe from COVID-19, although he praised the work of director of sports medicine Ron Courson and his staff. Like other schools, the positivity rate at Georgia has gone up since students have returned to campus. But the Bulldogs don’t pubicly share their own case counts for student-athletes.

So far, the disruption to the fall camp schedule has been minimal, Smart indicated.

UGA tight ends update

Georgia’s tight end room got a major makeover this offseason.

Five-star freshman Darnell Washington enrolled in Athens, and graduate transfer Tre’ McKitty arrived from Florida State. Smart praised McKitty on Saturday, emphasizing both his receiving and blocking skills as nice additions to the tight end unit.

As far as Washington, the focus for him has been his weight. At one point he weighed 273 pounds, and Smart said the staff told him to get his playing weight to 263 pounds in order to be most effective.

Add to that duo redshirt sophomore John FitzPatrick and redshirt freshman Ryland Goede, and the Bulldogs have a deep and talented group of tight ends. Whether they will play a bigger role in 2020, however, remains to be seen.

Snap counts giving Bulldogs trouble

The COVID-19 pandemic will result in smaller stadium capacities around college football. With that comes an added wrinkle in the strategy teams will employ.

Offenses might make more use of hard snap counts in an effort to make the defense jump offsides and secure a free five yards. Georgia worked on that in Saturday’s scrimmage, but it didn’t go well.

“We jumped offsides on defense I don’t know, three or four times,” Smart said. “When the offense did go on any hard count, they jumped offsides. It’s like it’s supposed to be a weapon, and today it was not a weapon.”