There’s a lot that we know about Georgia Head Coach Kirby Smart.
We know he loves his family, that he’s a Georgia boy through and through, and that he cannot say no to a nice tiramisu after dinner.
But what many Georgia fans don’t know is that Smart was an avid reader as a child. Potentially due to unspoken pressures that come with a last name like that, Smart found himself enthralled with books from a young age, oftentimes getting lost in the pages. Fiction, fantasy, football, you name it; Smart liked
to read it all.
Although this habit slowed a bit as he progressed through this crazy game we call life, there is one story in particular that he always finds time for. This is of course “The Tortoise and the Hare”, one of Aesop’s famed Fables.
In this story, after getting off to slow start, the much-slower tortoise, using his “slow and steady” approach, is able to best the boisterous hare in a race. After getting out to a seemingly insurmountable lead, the hare decides to take a break, assuming the race is already won.
This fable is a good lesson for kids; it teaches them that perseverance and dedication can overcome a lack of talent. People that work hard for what they want and are confident in themselves can achieve their wildest dreams.
But this story is also massively flawed, as it relies on an overly-cocky hare. If the hare was evenly mildly humble, the race would have been no contest. You could argue that the hare lost the race more so than the tortoise won it.
In the football world, perseverance and commitment to staying the course can go a long way. A tortoise is certainly capable of coming back from an early deficit.
But when the hare you’re racing is just as talented, just as competitive, has lost to the tortoise several times in the last 1o years, or is coached by a former colleague of the tortoise’s coach and really wants to beat him, it’s unlikely the hare is going to take a break. Relying on the hare to lose the race is not a sustainable method.
For all the wisdom that Aesop foretold, the Greek died thousands of years before college football, and he most certainly did not understand the dynamic of the expanded SEC in the NIL and Transfer Portal era.
The last 2.5 seasons have seen Georgia playing the role of the tortoise far too often, especially against lesser opponents. Part of that is on the hare being fired up and wanting to make a statement, but some of the blame has to fall on the shoulders of the Georgia coaching staff for failing to prepare their contestant.
And while the record in that time is still respectable, Georgia is a Haynes King fumble and a made FG from a Tennessee 12-year old away from being 3-4 in their last 7 games.
If Kirby and Co. insist on continuing to use the teachings of “The Tortoise and the Hare”, they should do so not from the perspective of the tortoise, but from that of the hare.
If the hare had trusted himself, stayed the course, and focused on performance instead of final results, he would have been victorious. And more importantly he wouldn’t have been the laughing stock of the world for thousands of years.
Georgia has all the talents to be a hare, they just have to use them. Get off to a good start, continue to play your style, and see what the score is at the end of the game.
Constantly rooting for the tortoise to mount a comeback is stressful. If Georgia doesn’t start assuming the role of the hare, I’ll soon start losing mine.
