Josh Pate Labels Georgia’s Kirby Smart as the Most Powerful Coach in College Football

When Nick Saban retired from head coaching before last season, he vacated the label of college football’s most influential figure. On Sunday night on “Josh Pate’s College Football Show,” Pate discussed the current power dynamic among coaches in the sport.

Though Georgia hasn’t won a national title over the past two seasons — instead, Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh and Ohio State’s Ryan Day have — Pate believes Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart is the cream of the crop for headset-wearing sideline bosses in the sport.

Pate’s reasoning has a lot to do with Smart’s body of work after leaving Nick Saban and Alabama’s staff in 2015. Georgia has gone 105-19 under Smart’s direction. The Bulldogs won back-to-back College Football Playoff national titles in 2021 and 2022, appeared in another CFP championship game in 2017, and captured three SEC crowns.

“Kirby Smart is the most powerful coach in college football right now because he’s won, and he’s won for a long time,” Pate said. “And I wanna remind you, he left Alabama, where he was Saban’s defensive coordinator, and then he went over to Georgia and he proceed to build as close of a replica to what Saban had built in Tuscaloosa as anyone did.

“Now, he still had trouble getting over that Alabama hump, that Nick Saban hump, but so did pretty much everyone else the side of Dabo Swinney. But, he went over there and he did what many people in the profession thought couldn’t be done and he built something — he built a model, he built a program — that most closely resembled Alabama. They play to the same level of standard, they operated very similarly, they recruited very similarly, there was a tenacity, there was … a vibe that the program gave off.”

Last season, Kirby Smart became the fifth-fastest coach to reach 100 career wins in FBS history, requiring just 117 contests to do so. He’s posted seven campaigns of at least 11 wins.

Smart was a four-time letter-winner as a player at Georgia, earning a first-team All-SEC nod as he led the conference in interceptions during his senior go-round. These days, when Smart addresses important topics regarding the sport’s landscape, people stop to listen.

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“When he talks about the sort of existential, bigger-picture issues facing college football, people listen,” Pate said. “He’s got near-universal respect amongst his peers.”