“A lot of times guys don’t learn until they get their tail beat..."

So, what did Kirby Smart learn from last week’s 45-14 loss to Ole Miss that he can apply to Saturday’s key SEC East matchup against Tennessee?

Smart offered up his thoughts on that and more during an interview with Atlanta radio station 680 The Fan Wednesday afternoon.

“You learn a lot. First, you learn to be positive to your players, and you’ve got to challenge them to compete. That’s what you find out a lot about your team. You find out who is with you, who is willing to go fight, who’s willing to shut it down, who’s willing to respond,” Smart said. “For a team, that had been labeled as no quit, no stop, that’s what I wanted to see. That’s what I challenged them to do at halftime, to fight and compete.”

So, did the Bulldogs learn their lesson in time to make a good showing on Saturday?

Smart obviously hopes so.

“As long we learn from it and what we have to do better to avoid it, it can be that way,” he said. “It’s another opportunity and that’s what you want, where you’re dying to say, man, let’s get back out there, let’s go play, let’s prove ourselves, let’s prove we’re a good football team and we’ve got an opportunity to do that.”

Smart also had the following to say:

• On experience being the best teacher: “The best way to learn is experience. Those experiences, we have to draw upon to make sure they don’t happen again. That’s not only what we challenged Jacob (Eason) to do, but every player, to not make the same mistake twice. If it costs you once, that’s enough. Let’s learn from it and move on, get better, challenge to compete, move on, get better and don’t let it snowball. I think our kids understand that they’ve got an even greater challenge this week against a very, very good football team in Tennessee.”

• On what it takes for players finally getting it: “A lot of times guys don’t learn until they get their tail beat and we’re trying to improve in so many areas, we’re not a real big football team right now and we’ve got to be more physical, so we’ve got to be physical and have fight when we don’t have the same size as the guy next to us.”

• On the Tennessee backfield of Alvin Kamara, Joshua Dobbs and Jalen Hurd: “Alvin Kamara is such a classic slasher, and Jalen Hurd who is the most physical, punishing runner that I’ve seen in a long time. He really tries to hurt you when he’s running the ball so we’ve got to have the demeanor that I’m going to be more physical than he is. We’ve got to strike him, tackle him, gang-tackle him because he’s a big, physical runner. He chips guys, he’s a legitimate really good player and then you have Dobbs who is hard to tackle in space and that’s one of the poor things we did last week.”

• On fixing the running game issues: “Keep looking at it, being stubborn with it, knowing that you’ll be able to run the ball in certain situations. We actually ran the ball better last week than we had the previous week, but situations came up when we were in long yardage and had to catch up. A 6-yard run would be great, but a 6-yard run and we were third-and-7 because we were first and 15 so we were setting ourselves back. When we did run it well, you want to take a shot and be aggressive but we missed two shots, hit guys in the hands on plays they should make, so it was a snowball effect. But we ran the ball better. I was pleased we were able to run it better but we just not were consistently able to do it.”