ATLANTA — At SEC Media Days this week, Texas is the story. (Well, aside from the rumor that Nick Saban is returning to coaching. But that’s just a rumor. For now.) Texas as a program is the likely preseason favorite to win the SEC, and Arch Manning is the week’s most anticipated student-athlete participant. Burnt orange is doing its best to smother the SEC.

Kirby Smart and Georgia would like a word.

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Georgia is now two-plus years removed from its last national championship, which in the Kirby Smart era qualifies as a Saharan dry spell. The Dawgs missed out on the final four-team playoff after the 2023 season, and fell to Notre Dame in the quarterfinals of last year’s expanded CFP after losing starting quarterback Carson Beck to injury.

So Georgia has something to prove, but it will have to do so with a class that has zero familiarity with winning national championships.

“Our team is going to be comprised of 54 percent first- and second-year players,” Smart said. “The COVID class (with an extra year of eligibility) has kind of aged out, so we had multiple players that were in their fifth and sixth year last year, especially across the offensive and defensive lines.”

Naturally, Smart is spinning that youthfulness into a positive, noting that the extremely young class brings “youthful exuberance” to Athens.

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“I think the biggest thing that separates college football teams today is complacency among players versus fire, passion and energy among players,” he said. “Our players need to bring juice and energy each and every day. If they don’t, they’ll be confronted by the players that do.”

One of those newcomers: quarterback Gunner Stockton, who was pressed into emergency service late last year but now has the starting job outright. “He’s the kind of kid you want at the front of the line, and he leads from the front,” Smart said. “He’s going to be a big part of our program this year in leadership.”

Smart hinted at the Georgia program’s largest question mark — the offensive and defensive lines — and later in his press conference on Tuesday indicated why there might not be a quick fix if the team starts slow in its effort to develop its younger players.

“You don’t speed up development,” he said. “If you want to speed up development, then you’re probably looking for shortcuts that don’t exist. You want to develop somebody. It takes time. It takes reps. We can’t replicate reps faster. We can’t speed up a guy’s transition.”

In other words, Georgia won’t have much time to get those youthfully exuberant players up to Smart’s standards. The Bulldogs will begin the season with two non-conference games to provide them a little bit of a buffer before diving full-fledged into its SEC schedule, which begins with Tennessee and Alabama and runs right on through that date with Texas in mid-November. (Smart didn’t say it, but we will: the Dawgs beat Texas twice last season. Just so everyone remembers.)

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On the plus side, while Georgia’s 2025 schedule is a brutal one, it breaks very much in the Dawgs’ favor — the two marquee games, Texas and Alabama, will both kick off between the hedges at Sanford Stadium. Georgia will need to go on the road to face Tennessee and Auburn, and neutral-site trap games against Florida and Georgia Tech also loom, but having a home crowd behind them for the two biggest games of the season will be immensely valuable.

Smart remains one of the sharper observers of the college football condition, though obviously with a pro-coaching bias. He sees a way through college football’s current travails, and to him, it’s all about having the right people in the right places.

“College athletics and college football is not broken,” Smart said. “I would say that it’s in a time of change and influx, that … you have to navigate better than your competitor, whether that’s conference to conference or within your own conference. We continue to find ways to do that at the University of Georgia. We sell relationships over transactions. We think the relationship still wins out because the relationship allows you to push people and demand excellence, and we’re going to continue to do that at Georgia.”

It’s worked out pretty well so far.