Georgia made Kirby Smart college football’s highest-paid coach. But at what cost?

Earl Ehrhart says he only encountered Kirby Smart once, in March 2016, before Smart had coached a football game at Georgia. Perhaps then it should have been obvious the signs were already there that this Georgia football coach would play defense better than any Bulldogs coach before him.

At the time, Ehrhart was the longest-tenured Republican in the Georgia House of Representatives. Smart had visited the capitol with university athletics department officials and been asked the differences between Georgia and other programs he was at previously. His answer convinced Ehrhart to introduce an 11th-hour amendment that changed the state’s open-records laws to conform with others in the SEC, most notably Alabama – where Smart had just worked under Nick Saban for nine seasons.

Smart was strategic and calculated, “from the very beginning” of his tenure, said former Georgia athletics director Greg McGarity, who was in the room. This particular meeting wound up providing Georgia’s athletics department and other public colleges in the state up to 90 business days to respond to open-records requests instead of three days.

Smart, when asked at the time, did not elaborate on how the amendment would help Georgia’s football program. Ehrhart said it was meant to protect the identities of prospects the Bulldogs were recruiting. McGarity said it helped his overwhelmed staff, which handled open records requests made to the athletics department.

“I hope it brings us a national championship,” then-Lieutenant Gov. Casey Cagle declared on the House floor. Several media reports declared it “Kirby’s Law.” Smart bristled at the nickname, calling it “ridiculous.”

Smart “talked about that competitive advantage. It wasn’t about a lack of transparency. It was a competitive disadvantage across the board against all the other SEC schools,” Ehrhart recalled to USA TODAY Sports last month.

Eight years and two national titles later, the notion of Georgia taking a backseat to anybody in college football is almost laughable. Few operate quite like Smart and Georgia right now, with Alabama about the only team consistently standing in the Bulldogs’ way anymore.

Smart has moved into Saban’s spot as the highest-paid college football coach in the country this year, according to USA TODAY Sports’ annual analysis of coaches’ compensation released Wednesday. He is the first coach to earn more than $13 million in annual pay from a school after Georgia announced in May that it had extended his contract through 2033. It is about $2.5 million more than Smart made from the school in 2023 and is about $2 million more than what Clemson’s Dabo Swinney is set to make as the second-highest paid coach in the country (just over $11 million). It is the largest gap between the nation’s two highest-paid coaches in terms of recurring annual compensation since USA TODAY Sports began its salary database in 2006.