Georgia head football coach Kirby Smart took the podium for his SEC Media Days press conference on Monday, and 92.9 The Game hosts Carl Dukes and Mike Bell weren’t all that impressed with the line of questioning the Bulldogs head coach faced.
Smart mentioned briefly in prepared remarks the January incident that led to the loss of a player and graduate assistant and wasn’t pressed by reporters on it nor the ongoing speeding ticket and dangerous driving issues with members of the Georgia football program.
Kirby was asked more about the hazing scandal uncovered last week at Northwestern than anything else, and that didn’t make a ton of sense to Bell.
“Unfortunately if you’re looking for penetrating questions, you didn’t get the answers,” he said Monday on Dukes & Bell.
Dukes responded that it came down to two things. The first thing was pretty simple.
“They don’t care,” Dukes said. “Because if you care, you go in knowing, ‘I’ve got a line of questioning that we need to get answered.'”
Dukes said the second part of it was the fact that Kirby’s now getting a different level of respect in the press now that the Bulldogs have won back-to-back national championships. He added that it was something he didn’t have early on in his career at Georgia.
“Now with the winning and the recruiting and the way things are going, I do think he’s getting that treatment,” Dukes said. “That treatment is, you treat him with respect, and you don’t try to take him down a road where it might be troublesome or it might make him feel or look a certain way.”
To Carl, and Mike agreed, it just came off as the press lobbing more softballs at Kirby Smart than anything.
“It wasn’t aggressive. I’ve seen better press conferences in market 58,” Dukes said. “I mean seriously. It wasn’t anything that you go, ‘That’s how you conduct hard-hitting questions in a presser where this coach doesn’t talk a whole lot, hasn’t spoken this offseason but once, and that was a private session.'”
