I’ve respected the brutal honesty of Kirby Smart since becoming Georgia’s head coach. He certainly has not been afraid to say things like, “There's a lot of bad things that happened [in the kicking game],” “I have been really concerned about our tackling all year. I have not been happy with it anytime,” “We lost a lot of one-on-one situations [against Auburn] but we lost a lot of one-on-one situations throughout the year,” and “Every game we have won, we have had areas of concern for me”—and such directness by the head coach was all said within the first six minutes of his Monday press conference.

Still, Smart’s candor with the media the week of facing Kentucky doesn’t quite compare to the outspoken frankness between two legendary coaches and friends just prior to when the Bulldogs and Wildcats played long ago.

The night before the 1947 Georgia-Kentucky game, the ‘Cats threw the visiting and two-touchdown-favored Dogs a party at Lexington's Keeneland Race Track. Georgia’s Wally Butts and Kentucky’s Paul “Bear” Bryant sat together, along with a newspaper reporter within earshot recording their exchange. The two discouraged coaches were filled with so much pessimism, it's difficult to comprehend 70 years later.

BUTTS: "I don't know what we'll do if we have to substitute our ends."

BRYANT: "Tell you want I'll do, I'll trade you six [ends] for either [Wayne] Sellers or [Dan] Edwards."

BUTTS: "Including [Wallace] Jones and [Dick] Hensley?"

BRYANT: "Including all of 'em."

BUTTS: "Anyway, we're pitiful in reserves at that position."

BRYANT: "Well, I just hope you'll take it easy on us. We're building for the future."

BUTTS: "That's a laugh. You've got the best material in the league."

BRYANT: "At one time, I might have had, but you know 12 of them quit."

BUTTS: "Anyway, every time I look at the North Carolina pictures (Georgia had been defeated by UNC two weeks before), I see how bad an offense we have."

BRYANT: "It'll look good [against us] tomorrow night."

BUTTS: "You're kidding now. It couldn't possibly look good. We just don't have the personnel."

BUTTS: "I'll tell you this, that Alabama is going to beat the dickens out of somebody before the season is over and I'll guess it'll be ol' Georgia."

BRYANT: "Yea, you're right. But, instead of Georgia, it'll be Kentucky. We don't have a chance to win a conference game."

Notably, Alabama wound up beating the dickens out of Georgia and Kentucky that season. However, the Wildcats did win a conference game—two of them in fact, including a 26-0 upset over the Bulldogs the following night. Still, Butts and his boys would get revenge on the Bear and his ‘Cats the following season, easily handling Kentucky in Athens, 35-12.

Soon afterward during the spring, another writer, the acclaimed Grantland Rice, discovered the two head coaches together again talking football and, again, at a Kentucky racetrack—the Kentucky Derby, to be exact. At the time, the Bulldogs and the Wildcats were considered arguably the top two teams in the SEC. Therefore, perhaps the once gloomy outlooks of the coaches had been transformed into viewpoints of optimism—or not.

When Rice asked Butts and Bryant which schools would contend for the conference crown the upcoming season, the coaches agreed on a pair of teams that would undoubtedly be the strongest in the SEC—Tennessee and LSU.