- Kirby Smart still builds his Georgia teams by developing top high school recruits rather than relying on transfers.
- Indiana won in contrast to Smart’s methods. The Hoosiers won with transfers.
- The 2026 season will test if Smart’s strategy can produce another national championship, as Georgia relies on his highly-ranked 2024 recruiting class.
Let me rewind the clock for you to a fall Saturday in 2022. After Georgia busted out the whooping stick on Tennessee, coach Kirby Smart puffed out his chest and touted his team reigned despite signing no transfers in the previous offseason.
“A bunch of the kids that love this place,” Smart said then of his 2022 Bulldogs.
They loved winning, too, and they were darn good at it. Georgia captured a second straight national championship with a roster forged by Smart’s perennially excellent recruiting classes, which he so expertly developed into NFL talent.
Smart’s back-to-back championship teams formed a firewall against transfer free agency changing the formula to greatness.
Smart won national titles much like Nick Saban had done at Alabama.
He signed a bevy of blue-chip recruits. He retained them. He developed them. He ruled.
Then, the firewall fractured.
In the years since Smart’s second title, the game’s changed. How could you dispute that, after Indiana just won the national championship? Transfers from schools like California, Maryland and James Madison fueled the Hoosiers’ success.
Schools like Ohio State and Texas aren’t sitting on their hands. A pair of traditional recruiting powers, the Buckeyes and Longhorns also took big swings this month in the transfer market.
Ryan Day and Steve Sarkisian each compiled their biggest transfer class ever. Clearly, they’re not treating Indiana’s success as a fluke.
And off in the corner, marching to his own drumbeat, stands Smart. The Georgia coach built his 2026 roster much as he’s always done. He’s lambasted a culture where, as he puts it, many athletes want college football’s paycheck without its physicality.
Never mind that the Hoosiers, including their transfers, looked mighty physical this past season, while showcasing a defense superior to Georgia’s. Led by Indiana, the Big Ten supplanted the SEC as the bully on the block.
And never mind that Smart last won a College Football Playoff game in the 2022 season. Georgia allowed 39 points in a playoff loss to a Mississippi team built from the portal. What’s this I hear about physicality?
Smart signs more transfers than he once did, but he’s nonetheless still using the portal much more sparingly than most of his peers. Smart’s focus remains on signing, retaining and developing top recruiting classes filled with four- and five-star teenagers.
He’s a throwback to what’s quickly becoming a bygone era.
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Does Kirby Smart’s roster strategy still make sense?
You cannot call this a fool’s errand, because Smart is no fool. He remains a preeminent coach of a premier program. Even without a playoff win, the Bulldogs went 26-6 the past three seasons. They’re the two-time defending SEC champions. A vast majority of coaches would trade their roster for Smart’s.
This 2026 season will be a litmus test of whether Smart’s methods still can produce a team that’s better than good — that’s the best in the nation.
It’s time for Georgia to start collecting dividends from a 2024 recruiting class that ranked No. 1 nationally. That year, Smart signed more than 10% of the nation’s top 100 prospects. He retained most of them, too. Georgia’s 2026 roster includes 10 players who were top-100 prospects in the 2024 class.
That’s the old Saban blueprint at work. It’s up to Smart to prove that formula still produces national championships.
Georgia’s 2026 season pinned to 2024 recruiting class
Georgia’s 2024 recruiting haul included star running back Nate Frazier. Mostly, though, the fingerprints of that recruiting class will be found next season within a Georgia defense that’s slipped from the nation’s elite.
Those 2024 recruits now will be third-year players. Shouldn’t that be a payoff point? There’s a track record for it.
Smart’s 2021 national championship team featured defensive stars like Nolan Smith, Travon Walker, Nakobe Dean and Lewis Cine. They were third-year players who’d signed as blue-chippers among a ballyhooed 2019 recruiting class that ranked second nationally only to Alabama’s class.
Smart’s 2024 class ranked as being even better than his 2019 class.
Months before Smart won his first national championship at Georgia, he took a not-so-subtle jab at Dan Mullen after the Bulldogs throttled Florida: “There’s no coach out there who can out-coach recruiting.”
At that time, nobody was out-recruiting Smart. Georgia remains a recruiting juggernaut, and yet Indiana owns the big trophy, while the SEC has not sent a team to the national championship game in any of the past three seasons.
Indiana won with a bunch of guys who came out of high school as three- or two- or even zero-star recruits, before flourishing with the Hoosiers.
I guess Curt Cignetti knows how to out-coach (and out-develop) recruiting rankings.
Four years ago, Smart took pride in winning without transfers. After signing the SEC’s smallest transfer haul, he’s doubling down on his methods. For that to pay off, the coveted prospects from Georgia’s 2024 recruiting class must play up to their billing, lest we start to wonder whether Smart has fallen behind the times.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.