Kirby Smart jabs Oregon recruiting success: Wish I could get some of that NIL money

Life in the SEC quite often ceases to exist at the conference border which, as you may have heard, recently extended to Austin, Texas. But in his address at the main podium at SEC media days in Dallas on Tuesday, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart swerved off his main topic to, ahem, highlight the success Oregon has enjoyed on the recruiting trail recently.

"This year we took Nike, who I've had the great pleasure of meeting Phil Knight and his wonderful wife Penny," Smart said. "Wish I could get some of that NIL money he's sharing with Dan Lanning, but that's other note."

Nebraska AD Troy Dannen estimated Oregon was one of two schools nationally with a $23 million NIL budget. Whatever the actual number, it doesn't take Warren Buffet to surmise the Ducks' success has a price tag attached, as is now allowed by commonly-accepted rules. 

Oregon's transfer portal class ranked second nationally, its 14-man haul trailing only Ole Miss's 24-man class. There, the Ducks secured Oklahoma quarterback Dillon Gabriel, UCLA quarterback Dante Moore, Texas A&M wide receiver Evan Stewart, Washington cornerback Jabbar Muhammad, and Michigan State defensive lineman Derrick Harmon, among others. 

With 16 high school commits at press time, Oregon's recruiting class checks in at No. 4 nationally. The Ducks landed the nation's top wide receiver prospect Dakorien Moore on the Fourth of July, with blue chips from Florida, Maryland, Kansas, Illinois and Missouri supplementing their West Coast pipeline. 

Knight is free to spend his estimated $45 billion personal fortune how he wants, though the Nike chairman emeritus's involvement has undoubtedly sparked discussion across college football, particularly at fellow Nike schools. (Oregon would assuredly prefer we point out its collective, Division Street, is its own entity separate from Oregon and Nike. Its competition would like to note Division Street is run by former Nike executives, with underwriting from Knight.)

If Smart has any hard feelings about Knight and Nike, those were buried under admiration for the powerhouse brand and its founder. The Oregon jab came up as a sidebar in a story Smart told about how an offseason study of Nike benefitted Georgia. There's a great coaching point in here that doesn't require the budget of a Georgia or an Oregon to implement:

The study of Nike for us has been incredible. I didn't know some of the things about when Nike originated. We took a week-by-week look in skull sessions, break-out sessions, as well as together and studied their model.

One of the first things we studied was the belief of assume nothing. I think that's so important in football, because when you assume something or you assume you know someone or that you know somebody's name that you're in the room with, you can take things for granted.

Just like starting over from a previous year, assume nothing. Assume nothing. Start from ground zero and build the team different than every other team; Nike did that. Assume nothing. Where does a name come from? If you assume you know everybody's name you may not know what that name means.

We had each player get up in front of the team and say what their first, middle, and last name and where that came from. I encourage you if you've never done that exercise in an organization, do it. You learn more about somebody when you know where they got their name from and what it stands for, what it means in their family and lineage.

It's very important and you get a lot of deep conversations to know somebody better, which when you're on the field with somebody and go to battle, you better be able to know what their reasoning is. I really enjoyed that and our study of Nike.

Back to the present, Lanning will get a chance to respond to Smart's comment at Big Ten media days next week. The 38-year-old was a GA under Smart on Alabama's national championship team in 2015, then coached under him for four seasons at Georgia. His final game in red and black saw the Bulldogs win their first national championship since 1980, and his first game in green and yellow was a 49-3 loss to Georgia in Atlanta.

Thanks to Phil Knight, Oregon and Georgia's next meeting will be much closer than that.