Kirby Smart compares how SEC postseason spots are handled in football, other sports

Georgia football head coach Kirby Smart took to the 2025 SEC Spring Meetings on Tuesday to discuss how SEC postseason spots are handled in football and other sports around the conference.

“I think I have a good understanding of where it is and the decisions that have to be made,” Smart responded when asked about the College Football Playoff. “I don’t think those decisions get answered here. There’s a lot of thinking heads and people that need to come together to get to where we want to go. We have a small sample size of what we did and we’re going to get another sample size under a similar format.”

Seeding to impact College Football Playoff this season

Unlike the first ever 12-team College Football Playoff that took place last season, this season will introduce straight seeding.

This comes following criticism of seeding in last year’s College Football Playoff. Under the seeding model used last season, the top-four ranked conference champions earned a bye week. The remaining teams were seeded in the order that the selection committee had ranked them. However, that ended up with teams ranked lower by the selection committee getting the bye ahead of teams ranked higher.

Of the four teams that earned the bye last season, none were able to win their first game. That included ninth-ranked Boise State and 12th-ranked Arizona State. It also included the top-two ranked teams in Oregon and Georgia.

“Where it goes in the future… I don’t know where that goes,” Smart cautiously uttered. “I’m not looking at it in a self preservation mode (which happens a lot in college football). These meetings are that way, these conferences are that way. I’ve learned from the best in the business that you’re trained to constantly sustain the game and make the game better and not just do it for what’s just best for me or just for self preservation.”

SEC teams dominate the postseason

The 2x National Championship winning coach continued on about the SEC, and how it repeatedly gets the most teams in almost every sport’s postseason. Just this past season, 14 of the 16 SEC schools made the NCAA Basketball and Softball Tournament and 13 of the 16 SEC schools made the NCAA Baseball Tournament.

“I look at women’s softball, I look at men’s basketball, I look at men’s baseball”, Smart continued. “It just absolutely blows my mind how the SEC can end up with the teams they end up with in those positions. If you look at the [other sports], 13 of 16 or 14 of 16 (and they’re larger pools) but you see what they’re able to do and there’s no outcry.”

Finally, Smart ended his opening comments by discussing the importance of RPI and strength of schedule that the selection committee imposes on the entire sport.

“They do a lot of things based on RPI and strength of schedule. They award teams for that,” Smart said. “I have a hard time seeing Ole Miss, Alabama and South Carolina not being in the best teams last year, and that’s for me a big part of the SEC. People want to say ‘well, you need to play nine games or eight games.’ We don’t really know which of those to do until we know the Playoff format.

“I beg everybody in this room to question would we have been better off not playing Clemson last year or be play another SEC game to make nine games. How would that have been better for the SEC? How would that have been better for Georgia? I don’t think it would have.”

Smart and the Georgia Bulldogs kick off the 2025 season at home against Marshall on August 30.

— On3’s Dan Morrison contributed to this report.