ROWE: Kirby Smart illustrates how serious Georgia is about NIL, roster-building

If you ever catch yourself wondering how Kirby Smart feels about all of this Name, Image, and Likeness hoopla or that transfer portal stuff, I think you can just go back to his Monday press conference to get a pretty clear picture. Smart spent around 20 minutes in front of reporters where his responses to two questions from different reporters revealed how his program looks at roster building and NIL’s role in it.

A team can be “serious” about NIL or “committed” in different ways. If neither of those words apply to a program, it’s because they’re not worried about raising funds, educating their student-athletes on how to make the most of it, and/or don’t have a clear philosophy or structure for it. Some programs are willing to do what it takes for a player they think they need. Other programs, and Georgia probably falls more under this umbrella, will do what it takes to hold on to the players who are key to their program.

There’s not a right or wrong way to be committed to or serious about NIL, at least it hasn’t been proven yet, but Smart’s comments during his Clemson media day press conference show that Georgia has a clear plan in place.

“We show the NFL salary cap,” Smart said. “We show the NFL minimum. We show the NFL the highest thing you can get at each position in franchise players. It’s very obvious what quarterbacks make as starting quarterbacks in the NFL, and by no means do I think that we are the NFL. But our kids acknowledge and recognize that the quarterback is a different position when it comes to NIL, and Carson does a good job handling that.”

Smart was obviously responding to a question around Carson Beck and how his NIL earnings, likely being much higher than his teammates, might impact the chemistry within the locker room. Georgia doesn’t shy away from the fact that things are different for each player. It’s a much bigger, more immature locker room than the NFL but there’s one model that has worked with these sorts of things.

That straight-forward approach is evidence of a detailed plan in place. When the Classic City Collective has to pony up to get a guy like Beck to return for another season at Georgia, it feels more like a commitment to success and winning in 2024 than it does one student-athlete getting paid more than another.

Keeping players around, a few who would have gone to the NFL but more who might try to transfer out for bigger and better NIL opportunities, is something Smart believes in. Evidence of that can be found when he addressed Dabo Swinney’s approach to the portal.

“I mean, I’m like Dabo,” Smart said. “If I could keep my entire roster, my roster, I’d be all for keeping my roster, my roster because I believe in the kids we sign, I believe in the kids we recruit, and I want to grow them to get better.”

If I have heard Smart talk about retention and roster continuity once, I’ve heard him talk about it a dozen times. But this statement went beneath the surface a bit. The Georgia head coach will dip into the portal and he has done so more with each passing year, tripling the haul from three in 2023 to nine in 2024. That’s because the Bulldogs lost roughly 20 players to the portal. Something had to be done and Smart did it.

But if you’re looking for how serious Georgia is about NIL or the transfer portal or managing it’s roster, those two quotes tell you everything you need to know. The Bulldogs may not be keen on trying to land the No. 1 player out of the transfer portal each year. They may or may not have the funds to make it happen or it may be a case of willingness or lack thereof. But what we do know is that given the choice between that and keeping some key guys around, Smart is going to choose the latter.

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