"Who would you rank as the coaches most important to UGA's success?"
A DawgsCentral user posting under the name PiousMonken posed that question to me in the spring of 2023, and I quickly realized that a good answer would require quite a bit of consideration.
When thinking about the question, I kept coming back to an old football cliche, "It's not the X's and the O's, but the Jimmys and the Joes that make the difference." I found myself considering the players who suit up on Saturdays. Good gameplans and great play calls are key to the success of any college football program, but they are usually only as good as the personnel executing them. With that in mind, I decided to broaden the scope of the rankings beyond members of the coaching staff.
It sparked a series of longform articles called 23 For 2023. The premise was simple- Profile the 23 people who were most important to Georgia’s success on the gridiron in 2023. To create such a list, one must make value judgments on what on and off-field assets are most important to a modern college football program.
It focused on players and coaches within the UGA program. Collectively, the series served as a giant preview for the season ahead. It became a favorite of subscribers, and it forced me to ask questions that I hadn’t before.
This year, I am bringing the list back once again. Naturally, it will be called 24 for 2024.
With his former mentor now manning a microphone on ESPN, Kirby Smart is college football’s most accomplished coach. In 2024, Smart will have to navigate significant staff turnover and seismic changes within the sport itself. Georgia came up short of a third straight national championship in 2023, but winning it all this season would give the Bulldogs three titles in four years. That achievement would cement the program as a modern dynasty.
Whether or not Georgia can reach that lofty pedestal, and how they go about trying to do it, will be largely influenced by the roles these 24 individuals play.
Today we continue the rankings with #4 Mike Bobo and #3 Carson Beck. Let’s get after it…
Previous Entries
#23 - Will a True Nose Tackle emerge for the Dawgs?
#16 - Trevor Etienne + #15 - Josh Crawford
#14 - Daniel Harris + #13 - Donte Williams
#12 - Earnest Greene + #11 Stacy Searels
#10 - Malaki Starks + #9 -Travaris Robinson
#8 - Mykel Williams + #7 - Tray Scott
#6 - Colbie Young + #5 - James Coley
#4 - Carson Beck + #3 - Mike Bobo
#2 - Glenn Schumann
“Who?”
That was the reaction of many when Georgia announced the first hire of Kirby Smart’s tenure in December of 2015.
Kirby had just been hired to replace Mark Richt, and he was helping Alabama’s defense prepare for the 2015 College Football Playoff by day while calling recruits for Georgia and assembling his first staff at night.
When Smart accepted the job at Georgia, he immediately knew one name who he wanted to bring along. It was a young analyst named Glenn Schumann, who was then just 26 years old. At Smart’s first press conference, he told the world that the young assistant would have an on-field coaching job.
Schumann got his start in the profession as a student assistant at Alabama. His father had played for Bear Bryant, but Glenn didn’t follow his path onto the field. He showed up as a student in Tuscaloosa in 2008 and asked for a role as a student assistant. Nick Saban brought him on board, and he quickly became a rising star on a Crimson Tide staff that was building Alabama into a dynasty.
Schumann became Kirby Smart’s right-hand man and was promoted to a graduate assistant when he graduated. In that role, he worked with Smart and Saban on installing Alabama’s defense, and he became an in-house expert on the team’s scheme.
In 2014, Schumann was promoted to Alabama’s Director of Football Operations, but his time as an on-field assistant earned him a reputation as a valuable resource among Alabama’s players. When Saban, Smart and others were busy, Alabama players would go to Schumann with questions about the Tide’s defense.
When he was hired at UGA, future Butkus Award winner Roquan Smith called Alabama players to try and learn more about the relatively unknown analyst who was going to be his Inside Linebackers coach. According to a 2018 article by Jason Butt in the Macon Telegraph, the Tide players told Smith that Schumann was a guru. When Smith watched film with Schumann the first time he was blown way. The relationship that the two men formed helped Smith understand Georgia’s defense on a deeper level, and that knowledge helped propel him and UGA to a national title game appearance and the 2017 SEC Championship.
Those kind of results saw Schumann go from the SEC’s youngest on-field assistant in 2016 to a co-defensive coordinator in 2019.
Up close with a sharp football mind
Georgia’s assistants aren’t available to the media too often. The position coaches and coordinators speak with the press once during fall camp, but that’s it. The College Football Playoff requires schools to have more availability. All Georgia coaches were made available to the media in the lead-up to UGA’s 2023 national championship game appearance against TCU. For a full hour, Georgia’s players and staff milled around a large room in the back of a convention center in Los Angeles.
Cameras and microphones swarmed around Kirby Smart, Brock Bowers, Stetson Bennett and others, but with about 15 minutes left in the session I noticed Schumann standing alone off to the side of the room.
His brain was in full prep mode for the title game. In fact, he was so engrossed in preparing for TCU, and fixing the mistakes that let Ohio State score 41 points in the CFP semifinal, that he wasn’t entirely sure how far away kickoff was. “It is two days, right? I’m just making sure. When you end up playing a game on Monday… It was great for the semifinal because it was, ‘oh, the game is on Saturday.’ The day of the week tells me exactly where we are.”
Schumann’s answers that day didn’t just open up a window into Georgia’s prep for TCU. They also showed his philosophies on defense and the way UGA plays.
I asked him about CJ Stroud’s long scrambles in the prior game… “One thing we do with every quarterback is watch their scramble drill… He had shown an ability to use his legs… We were aware of the fact he could do that. We still at the end of the day knew we had to go affect the quarterback and make sure we did everything we possibly could in our rush and in our pressures and disguises to try and affect him the best we could… Credit to him and the job he did, but he had shown that in big moments that he would do it and I think he obviously knew that he had to. We knew that he had to. We had to also make sure that you make him play quarterback in the way that he doesn’t want to play quarterback. Credit to him that he is plenty capable of doing it.”
Put simply, Georgia would rather make a good thrower run than throw.
Then on the topic of explosive plays… “For about every ten yards of explosive plays that you give up it’s worth about a point. You give up 200 yards of explosives, you probably gave up about 20 points. You give up 300 yards of explosives, you probably gave up 30… It’s not an exact correlation. Obviously there’s outliers there but I think that limiting explosive plays is really important. They might not have hit the home run 70-yarder, but there were too many plays in that game… We define explosives as over 12 yards running or over 15 yards passing and there were too many of those.”
Georgia’s calling card on defense under Kirby Smart has been its ability to stop explosive plays from happening. They play a style that is more focused on forcing opponents to drive the field one small chunk at a time than on creating havoc plays of their own.
So, how did Georgia fix its defensive errors and go out and deliver a historic performance to beat TCU 65-7 in a national championship game? Schumann detailed the process of looking inward.
“First thing we do… Was it schematic? Was it coaching based? It could be hey, the scheme was good but it was called at the wrong time. Was it matchup based where we lost a matchup, and if we lost a matchup was it correctable by better technique? Or sometimes you just give them credit on that play or it could be execution based… Then you go and look, and you write up the plays we gave up that we would deem explosives for us… There was a variety. We need to affect the quarterback better. There’s times where we need to get lined up better and we can help that as coaches, giving them the call sooner at times. Then we can also improve at times where a call came in fine and we need to improve our communication. I think it’s a whole big picture more than it’s one thing. We were really good on third-and-long. We were 7 for 8 on third-and-seven plus… Everytime we got them into a hard down and distance we got off the field, and we sacked the quarterback, and we forced bad throws. So we need to do a better job on first and second down defense because when we get to third we did a really good job in that regard.”
Schumann unknowingly summed up what makes him a special coaching talent when saying, “it’s a whole big picture more than it’s one thing.” Above all, Schumann has shown the ability to retain, contextualize and manage incredible amounts of information. He understands that Georgia’s defense is a living, breathing organism. Nothing occurs in a vacuum. If something goes wrong on the defensive line, it changes things for the secondary.
Georgia has had many stars over the years, but they have all excelled at playing within UGA’s system of team defense. The Bulldogs rarely cut guys loose to chase the QB. They collapse the pockets as a defensive line. They don’t want one player to make tackles in space. They want a gang of red helmets arriving at the ball.
Growing at home
Schumann has answered every question that’s been asked about him as a coach. There was a time where people wondered if he had the ability to recruit at a high level. Rival staffs used his youth and lack of playing experience against him early in his time at Georgia, but his development of Smith turned him into a trusted face in the living rooms of blue-chip recruits. Schumann has signed at least one five-star recruit at inside linebacker in each of the last four cycles, and he has another one committed in the 2025 class. Glenn has turned UGA into the modern LBU,
At 33 years old, Schumann won his sixth national title as an assistant. His football mind and growing list of achievements have turned him into a coveted figure in the coaching profession. After UGA’s second slight national title, Schumann interviewed for the Eagles DC job.
Philadelphia was coming off of a Super Bowl appearance, and the chance to interview was originally thought of as good experience for Glenn. He was so impressive that the Eagles thought hard about offering him the job. Schumann bowed out of the process as a finalist, but he would likely be the DC of an NFL team right now if he wanted to be.
Other programs have come knocking on the door plenty of times over the years, but Schumann remains loyal to Georgia and Smart. In 2024, the two will go through their 17th year coaching together. Schumann has subscribed to the same philosophy he preaches to his players- The team is bigger than one person.
Georgia sells players on development and learning before becoming the next UGA stars after learning behind the current UGA stars. Schumann could easily be a distraction every offseason, and create intrigue around his next destination. Instead, Glenn stays and learns from college football’s most accomplished active coach. Championships are won by everyone on the Georgia defense doing their jobs and eschewing individual stats. Schumann does that from a coaching perspective.
It’s similar to the way Kirby Smart handled his time under Saban, and Schumann could one day run his own burgeoning dynasty. Like his mentor, Schumann sees the bigger picture. There was a time when Smart considered the DC job on Mark Richt’s staff. Saban asked him why he’d go to work for Richt when he could likely wait and have the head job at Georgia in a few years. That thinking turned out to be correct. Schumann seems to be in a similar mindset when considering other opportunities. He’s probably not leaving Georgia for anything less than a high-level NFL job or a chance to run his own P4 program.
Here and now
Before any of those options come back up for consideration, the business of the 2024 Bulldogs will need to be handled. Schumann’s LB room might be the deepest he’s ever had. CJ Allen and Raylen Wilson played high-stakes snaps in the SEC Championship as true freshmen. Classmate Troy Bowles could be ready to contribute behind them. Veteran Smael Mondon returns from a foot injury that slowed him down the stretch in 2023. Behind that group are freshmen Justin Williams and Chris Cole, two more five-stars for Schumann’s cupboard. Both are special athletes, and Cole possesses the length to rush the passer off the edge.
Injuries ran through the position room in 2023, and the Dawgs didn’t meet their usual standard of play at times. This group of LB’s could anchor a rebuilt front seven looking to lead the UGA defense to another national title. A key to that might be hybrid ILB/OLB Jalon Walker. The junior has shown himself capable of getting to QB’s and he could add a dimension to the UGA defense that would represent another evolution of Georgia’s system. Walker can blitz from anywhere, but he can cover RB’s and TE’s in space and spy the QB as well.
Georgia has always looked to disguise their calls by showing offenses different looks before the snap. Walker could confuse that even further, especially when coupled with Mykel Williams. Williams will still play plenty of snaps as UGA’s 4I defensive end, but he will be freed up to be used as a stand-up pass rusher as well. He and Walker could rush passers at anytime, and UGA will also continue its usage of LB’s as pass rushers.
All of it opens up lots of opportunities for Schumann, Smart, and the rest of the UGA defensive brain trust to vary their alignments, fronts and personnel. UGA rode the MINT front to the top of the SEC, and took advantage of a generational group of defenders and pattern matching in the secondary to break through with its first national title in 41 years back in 2021.
If it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it. Georgia will start the season with 39 straight regular season wins, but the 2024 team was run on more effectively than any UGA team since 2020. Part of that was youth and injuries, but the minds of Kirby Smart, Will Muschamp, Glenn Schumann and Travaris Robinson are always evaluating things. A lot of those runs went outside the tackles, and that’s how Georgia’s defense is designed. The best coaches put their players in positions that fit their skill sets, and Schumann’s 2024 LB room will feature a fascinating amount of versatility. Will we see another update in alignment or philosophy that puts new tricks into Georgia’s system? We’ll start to get the answers when Georgia starts the season against Clemson on Saturday.
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