QB competitions are ‘the norm’ for Kirby Smart at Georgia. The latest on 2020 battle
Kirby Smart has been here before.
In 2016, his first year as Georgia’s head football coach, he managed a quarterback competition between highly-touted five-star Jacob Eason and incumbent Greyson Lambert. The following year saw a battle between Eason and freshman Jake Fromm. Then 2018 brought in five-star Justin Fields to compete with Fromm for the starting job.
“It’s getting to be the norm here,” Smart said Tuesday.
This comment didn’t come as a warm reflection on old times. For the fourth time in his five years at the helm in Athens, Smart has a decision to make at the most important position on the field.
After the opt-out of graduate transfer Jamie Newman, the main contestants seem to be redshirt sophomore transfer J.T. Daniels and redshirt freshman D’Wan Mathis. Each player comes with an injury history.
Mathis missed the 2019 season after undergoing emergency surgery to remove a brain cyst. He recovered and practiced with the team in the second half of the 2019 season.
Daniels is still in the midst of his recovery after tearing his ACL in USC’s first game last season. He didn’t have surgery to repair the ligament until the winter, a timetable that has resulted in him still waiting to be fully cleared by the team doctors.
Daniels has been practicing with the team, but Smart said he won’t be completely ready to go until the doctors clear him to be hit and tackled.
“We certainly expect him to get cleared and think he will get cleared, but that’s not my decision,” Smart said. “That goes a lot into (director of sports medicine Ron Courson) and them, it goes into flexibility, it goes into strength, how far is the left knee from the right knee, what is the girth of the knee, what is the muscle mass missing?”
Georgia opens the 2020 season Sept. 26 at Arkansas.
After Georgia’s third scrimmage of fall camp on Sept. 12, reports began surfacing that had Mathis in the lead for the job, citing his working the first team in the scrimmage. Smart toned down that notion on Tuesday, saying the staff has been rotating which quarterback gets the majority of first-team reps throughout camp.
“It’s been a lot more calculated in terms of reps and a lot more calculated in terms of what we do with each guy and how we develop each guy,” Smart said. “They’re all in different stages of their career and they’re all getting better.”
That setup surely stems from the multiple experiences Smart has had dealing with these kinds of competitions. Different quarterbacks, different offensive coordinators — he’s been through it all.
These situations, as they often do, came with plenty of dispute. Lambert won the job in 2016 but gave way to Eason after just one game. The freshman then went on to have plenty of ups and downs in his inaugural campaign in Athens.
Eason then beat out Fromm the next year, but lost the job after an injury in the season opener. Fromm led the Bulldogs to the brink of a national championship, but still had fans calling for his job with Fields on his heels the following year.
Quarterback competitions aren’t easy for anyone involved, the coaches or the players. The decision, in Smart’s mind, comes down to one thing: winning.
“You learn what each one wants, what each one kind of commands,” Smart said. “You try to figure out what gives you the best chance to win, what gives you the best chance to score points?
This story was originally published September 15, 2020 at 7:50 PM.