Kirby Smart is a great recruiter. Mark Richt was a solid recruiter. Nick Saban was a great recruiter.

It took 4 full seasons of Smart Recruiting at UGA after the transition before UGA had a talent level equal to Bama. That year for UGA was the covid year where UGA had big issues with covid opt outs, so 2021 was the first year Smart had talent on par with Bama.

One or two recruiting classes weren't going to catch Bama. They had the #1 or #2 class for something like 8 straight years when Smart arrived at UGA. I honestly didn't think any coach would be able to get on par with Bama with Saban there. The fact Smart actually did it is incredible. But it didn't happen until 2020/2021.

There's a reason why UGA started winning titles at that point. Bama didn't get less talent and Bama's coaching didn't get worse. UGA just became the first team to even the playing field in terms of talent.

Similarly, Bama's talent level won't go away with 1 year of a new coach. We won't know for 2-3 years if Bama can maintain their talent level under Deboer or if they fall off, but it certainly won't happen this year. It takes time to accumulate and time for talent to fade away.

*edit* The 247 talent composite shows how the talent gap between Bama and UGA closed under Smart.

In 2016, UGA was 110 points behind Bama in the talent composite.

2017, they were 67 points down.

2018 they were 21 points down

2019 they were 24 points down.

2020 UGA was 5 points up.

2021 UGA was down by a tenth of a point.

Bama didn't come back to the field at all. They went from 982 points in 2016 to 1001 in 2021.

You can look at that and say UGA went from 6th in talent to 2nd so it wasn't a big change... but that's not correct. The difference between the top 2-3 teams and the next group is very large.

This post was edited on 2/18/24 at 4:36 pm