ATHENS — Kirby Smart is all about relationships, and few are closer to him than Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks.
Brooks, in his fifth year serving as the Bulldogs athletic director, explained to DawgNation how he views Smart’s take on not appointing an official “general manager” in the face of a growing trend that has seen other programs appoint someone in that official capacity.
“I think first of all, you have to know the term gets thrown around a lot, and it means different things at different places, so there’s not just one cookie cutter way to do it,” Brooks said of the responsibilities school’s are asking of someone in a general manager position.
That’s probably true when you look at the NFL, and each school has a different dynamic.” Georgia’s dynamic is Smart, a 10th-year head football coach with two national championships, three SEC championships and a reputation as collegiate football’s master of modern day roster management.
“We have a highly intelligent, highly involved head football coach,” Brooks said, “(and) we have a great support staff underneath him, and I think we have a phenomenal executive staff when you talk about the people on my staff that work directly with him.”
Brooks points to the continuity at UGA as making Smart’s relationship-first leadership style work effectively.
“We’ve ben together a long time — I’ve been working with Coach Smart now nine years, and now I’m a fifth year AD with him who has staff members who have been with him four, five or six years.
“So there’s a lot of great continuity there, so I don’t think any of us want to just bring someone in from the outside and say, ‘You’re the GM, lead us.’ “
Indeed, Smart said the same thing, noting that he still believes the relationship part of student-athletes recruitment should be a priority.
“I don’t want a GM tagged to say, ‘this guy is going to be a negotiator, he’s going to go and close the deal and sign the deal,” Smart said on WJOX radio in Birmingham last week. “It’s still a relationship business for us.”
Brooks said Smart, along with himself, will continue to monitor how roster management and payroll evolves with the House vs. NCAA landmark case expected to be settled soon.
“It’s us working together on that, and this is a new world that’s ever-evolving,” Brooks said. We’re thankful we have a head coach who really gets it and knows what he wants.
“We’ll take his lead on that and see how he wants to evolve and how different staff members’ responsibilities may evolve, but I feel real good about our working relationship with him.”
Smart, as Brooks noted, has the bases covered when it comes to identifying, recruiting, managing and negotiating with players and their agents.
“We have people that do GM (roles),” said Smart, who was an academic All-American with a degree from Georgia’s highly regarded Terry College of Business. “We don’t sit here and say, ‘Well, Coach Smart does everything.’ I can’t do everything.
“(But) have people that talk numbers and do different things, we just don’t have somebody that’s making the ultimate decision because that guy doesn’t know the market.”
