St. Sonny “The patron saint of hoops”

Kirby Smart says the best coaches don’t hope for toughness from their team, they demand it everyday in practice “I asked them that the other day in a team meeting. I said, ‘Guys, what’s different about us?’ There’s been a better energy in practices this year. There’s been a little bit more buy-in. The leadership has held people a little more accountable.” “We’ve run the ball and stopped the run better. And I said, ‘Why have we done that?’ They said, ‘Well, we made it a point of emphasis, Coach. Y’all said we had to do this. We had to be able to run the ball and we have to be able to stop the run.’ And we have.” “Last year was a little bit different for Georgia. It was an outlier because we weren’t real good at it. We showed the stats every week in the offseason. We rubbed their nose in it.” “We made a committed effort in the offseason to say, instead of doing one-on-one pass every day at our light practices, we’re going to do run drills. We’re going to block fronts. We’re going to block stunts and movement.” “We’re going to really work on stopping the run and running the ball, even if we’re not in pads. And then when we put pads on in the spring, we’re going to do a little more run emphasis. We’re going to throw less RPOs when we run.” “We’re going to commit to saying, ‘The people are in the box, and you’ve got to block them. You can’t just find ways around it.’ And I think you get what you demand in this world, and you get what you demand in this game. We probably demanded it more. It wasn’t that the last group was not capable. We probably didn’t demand it at that standard.”

Steve Kerr says Gregg Popovich was so good at delivering bad news that he could bench you and somehow make you feel good about it “Gregg Popovich was the best I’ve ever seen at delivering a bad message in a really good way. He took me out of the rotation as a player one time, and it was all very matter-of-fact, but I knew how much he cared about me. The way you deliver a message, I’ve never seen anybody as powerful as him, because he could tell you you’re being demoted but make you feel good about it.” “The way he would do it was with genuine compassion. ‘Hey, I know this is tough, but we’re going to take you out of the rotation. You stay with it, and here’s why.’ The clarity is really important. It can’t be, ‘Hey, just keep your head up. You’ll be fine.’ It’s got to be, ‘Here’s why. I’m going to play him because we need somebody to do this right now.’” “He would do it in a way that could also really be jarring, make you realize, ‘I’ve got to be better. My approach has to be better. My attitude has to be better.’” “And I realized then that coaching is not just encouraging and saying, ‘Hey, you know…’ You have to be honest with people at difficult times. But the way you deliver the message is everything. I’ve prided myself on that skill that Gregg Popovich showed me.”