Georgia still has a lot of work to do to get where Kirby Smart wants to go

Now we wait.

A little over three months stand in the way of Georgia returning to preseason practice to prepare for the upcoming season. Sure, the players will convene on their own time and go through voluntary workouts. But it won’t be until August before anyone gets a look at where Georgia is on the field.

In the meantime, there will be a lot of optimism about this program — it’s coming off an impressive 93,000-person showing at Sanford Stadium, Jacob Eason looked like the real deal at quarterback and recruiting has been going incredibly well.

While long-term expectations are deservedly high for Georgia, they should be tempered a bit in 2016. Even head coach Kirby Smart knows his team is very much a work in progress. If there’s anything we’ve learned about Smart it’s that he’s honest about his team — brutally at times.

He hasn’t sugarcoated the team he’s taken over one bit.

He wishes he had bigger offensive and defensive linemen. He’s called out players such as Sony Michel for not stepping up to the leadership table. He’s stated Georgia’s secondary, which finished first in the nation in yards allowed a season ago, needs better cover corners and that last year’s defensive scheme under Jeremy Pruitt “protected” the back end.

Smart stated his displeasure at how the defense performed at the G-Day game, and opened up his news conference by stating he wished his team put on a better show in front of the packed stadium.

And he’s right. This is a team with a lot of holes at the moment.

“We’ve got a lot of getting better to do,” Smart said.

There’s a lot of young talent on defense. But there hasn’t been a sense of cohesion on that side of the ball yet. Smart recently said the offense was ahead of the defense, which was surprising to hear considering the offense has a large installation overhaul compared to the defense keeping a lot of similar concepts.

Having to replace seven key contributors on defense is tough to overcome. Not having leaders Jake Ganus, Leonard Floyd and Jordan Jenkins will also be difficult to deal with from a communication standpoint.

Conversely, as great as the offense looked, it went against a vanilla defense and exploited some holes that may not have otherwise been there. For as good as Eason played — 19-of-29 passing for 244 yards and a touchdown — he showed a tendency to hold the ball too long when his first reads weren’t open. His decision-making, like any true freshman making the leap from high school football to the college game, will need to improve.

Georgia’s skill position players fared well. But Sept. 3 against North Carolina inside the Georgia Dome will be a lot different than going against teammates in a controlled environment.

The Bulldogs have a long way to go before being where they need to be. Fortunately for Smart, he has a lot of time to figure it out.

This story was originally published April 17, 2016 at 4:36 PM with the headline "Georgia still has a lot of work to do to get where Kirby Smart wants to go."