Many players walked into the Bulldogs’ practice facility Monday morning with the same demeanor they’ve had since the first days of spring practice – focused.
Georgia’s football team started the 2022 season ranked No. 3, but after just two weeks, Kirby Smart’s squad once again sits atop the college football rankings at No. 1.
Since the beginning of the season, the Bulldogs have dominated the Oregon Ducks (who were ranked No. 11 at the time) and the Samford Bulldogs to move to 2-0 on the year.
In that same time span, other teams’ performances have led to Georgia’s two consecutive one-spot jumps in the past couple of weeks.
In the first week of the season, the Bulldogs jumped the previously No. 2 Ohio State Buckeyes after a lackluster performance against a backpedaling Notre Dame program that also lost to the Marshall Thundering Herd in Week 2.
In the eyes of the voters, Georgia’s 49-3 victory over Oregon looked a lot more convincing than the 21-10 win the Buckeyes squeaked out over the Fighting Irish, and the Bulldogs moved to No. 2 in the country after Week 1.
This past weekend, previous No. 1, and still No. 1 in the Coaches Poll, Alabama Crimson Tide narrowly edged out a win over the Texas Longhorns 20-19 in a game that ended the way it began – with a Will Reichard field goal.
The Crimson Tide battled through multiple penalty calls and benefited from a few bizarre plays. The first came on a potential Alabama safety which ended up being ruled an incomplete pass, and the other coming at the end of the first half when Texas’ kicker Bert Auburn missed a 20-yard chip shot to put the Longhorns up heading into halftime.
With a Georgia shutout over Samford (33-0) to compare it to, the AP Poll crowned the Bulldogs kings of the country at No. 1.
This puts the program in a familiar spot seeing as how they ended the 2021 season as national champions; however, it’s apparent that the players and coaching staff are more worried about their execution than their ranking.
In a press conference before practice on Monday, Smart assured that the rankings are irrelevant at this point in the season, and his hopes are that the team is more concerned with progressing internally as well.
“It’s never a big deal. It only matters at the end of the year. I don’t know that we’ve spent many weeks outside of the Top 10, and it never mattered whether we were inside the Top 10 or outside of the Top 10. It just is irrelevant,” Smart said. “[I’m] a lot more worried about how we execute a combo block than I am worried about what we’re ranked. And hopefully, the kids are the same way.”
Junior offensive lineman Warren McLendon confirmed these hopes after he was asked what it meant to be ranked No. 1.
“We really don’t pay attention to the ratings,” McLendon said. “We worry about getting better day by day and this upcoming game.”
The Bulldogs have shown through two games that they have some depth, and this has allowed them to be able to go harder during weekday practices in preparation for Saturdays.
This plays into one of the team’s many mantras, and redshirt sophomore Sedrick Van Pran explained how before Monday’s practice.
“[One of] our biggest things lately has been, ‘Nobody cares about your feelings,’” Van Pran said. “At the end of the day, whether you’re hurt, you are tired from class, nobody really cares. At the end of the day, you’re expected to do your job and that’s just what it is.”
This hardcore mentality has seemed to spread throughout the locker room, and Smart specified when he spoke about the team’s identity, and talked about how it benefits the program.
“You create an identity about what you believe in, and we’ve had a pretty good identity around here for a long time about being really physical,” Smart said. “The message might be tweaked game to game, year to year, but we hope the results and the process are the same. We don’t really change the approach based on who we play, based on the scoreboard, based on anything, so the focus is on us, and that doesn’t change.”