Georgia should demand Kirby Smart leave Alabama right now

The Georgia Bulldogs, not Alabama, should be Kirby Smart’s No. 1 priority right now.

Once the Georgia Bulldogs settled on Kirby Smart as their next head football coach, they should have become his No. 1 priority. Instead, the school is foolishly allowing him to stay with the Alabama Crimson Tide until their run in the College Football Playoff is over. The wise course of action for the Dawgs would be to require him to leave the Alabama program immediately.

Alabama defensive back Cyrus Jones told reporters that Smart informed players that he will stay with them during their College Football Playoff run despite being headed to Georgia as their next head coach. While it’s a nice sentiment from Smart to want to finish out the season with the players he’s coached all year, it’s not the right thing for his future employer. He’s got a lot of work to do to prepare Georgia for next season and any time he spends on Alabama takes time away from his Georgia preparation.

Smart is about to step into an entirely new world as a head coach. As much as he thinks he knows what he’s getting into at his alma mater, he doesn’t. Being the head coach of an SEC school is akin to being a CEO of a major corporation; it’s not just football coaching anymore. Instead, it’s learning to manage an entire football program.

He needs to get to Athens as soon as possible for a multitude of reasons. The first, and perhaps most important, is to get to know his current players as people. While he likely knows a lot about their football abilities by coaching against them, his knowledge of them as people has to be limited. It would be really easy for the Georgia players to feel slighted by their new coach remaining at a conference rival instead of getting to work with them. Delaying his start in Athens won’t get Smart off to the best start possible with his new players.

Part of being a head coach at a big-time program is learning to interact with donors. This is something Smart hasn’t had to do a lot of as a coordinator at Alabama. There’s going to be a steep learning curve for him. He needs to press a lot of flesh, learn a lot of names and forge quite a few positive relationships with the most important Georgia boosters. That’s pretty hard to do from the practice fields in Tuscaloosa.

Officials at Georgia should have dictated that Smart leave Alabama immediately in the event that they selected him as their head coach. In all honesty, they should be disappointed that Smart isn’t in more of a hurry to show up on campus. He is a Georgia alum and still is choosing to stay at one of their fiercest rivals longer than necessary. It just doesn’t serve their best interests in the slightest.

If you think Smart is doing this to preserve his relationship with boss, Nick Saban, you need to think again. The moment Smart elected to take the Georgia job his relationship with Saban changed forever. They will be rivals moving forward, not friends. If he’s staying at Alabama longer for his players, then so be it. It’s not about preserving some relationship with Saban or Alabama.

Georgia’s administration has dropped the ball on this one. Their job is to protect the interests of their players and their school. It’s clearly in their best interest to have Kirby Smart take their head coaching job immediately. Instead, they’re letting him continue to serve one of the very schools they’ve hired him to defeat.