ATHENS, Ga. — In the nine years Paul Finebaum had been interviewing Kirby Smart, this was as animated as Finebaum had seen Smart. They were on set together last month on Georgia’s campus, a day before the Dawgs’ game against Tennessee. It was three days after the College Football Playoff committee had dropped Smart’s team out of the projected field, and Smart was not hiding his disgust.

“He was great on the air. Off the air, he was out of this world. I mean he was genuinely angry,” Finebaum recalled last week. “I appreciated his candor. But it was a remarkable shift, especially to the last two years.”

And Smart wasn’t done. A night later, he went off on the selection committee again during his ABC postgame interview. And Smart still wasn’t done: A few weeks later, Smart took an unprompted shot — maybe playful, maybe not — at SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who was standing a few feet away.

It has been refreshing for those who want good content. For those who have watched Smart and his sideline antics from afar, it may seem natural. But for those who have watched Smart closely through the years, it’s a stark change, and it says a lot about where Smart and No. 2 Georgia are as they get ready for their CFP quarterfinal.

Smart usually has tried to avoid making headlines, a trait he took from Nick Saban: Do your job, worry about your team, ignore the critics and outside noise. The tone was set the summer of Smart’s first year when then-Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh took a shot at Smart on Twitter about satellite camps. When he asked about it, Smart replied, “What tweet?” with a wry, knowing smile. He was ready to diffuse the story.

This season, Smart has been willing to light the fuse.

Georgia coach Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs will play Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl. (Joshua L. Jones / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)

After Georgia’s win at Texas, Smart didn’t hold back in his ESPN postgame interview after officials reversed a call in Texas’ favor when fans threw debris on the field: “You know, these players get the best out of me. And I’m so proud of these guys. Because nobody believed. Nobody gave us a chance. Your whole network doubted us. Nobody believed us. And then they try to rob us, with calls, in this place.”

The shot at the “College GameDay” analysts who picked against Georgia wasn’t new. Smart did that after his team’s second national championship win. But “they try to rob us” was uncharacteristic. Smart, a member of the NCAA rules committee, rarely criticized officiating and didn’t join in with Georgia fans belaboring calls after the 2018 national championship game. Now he was jumping in, despite actually winning the game.

After his team’s win over Tennessee, Smart vented his frustration at the CFP committee, once again in his ESPN postgame interview: “I don’t know what they look for. I really don’t know what they look for anymore. I would welcome anybody in that committee to come down to this league and play in this environment.”

And finally, in the interview after the SEC Championship Game win, Smart was asked what getting a first-round bye meant: “It means rest for a team that Greg Sankey and his staff sent on the road … all … year … long!”

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Sankey stood stone-faced a few feet away but only because he couldn’t hear what Smart was saying amid audio issues on stage, according to people who were there. Not that Sankey and his staff could have been particularly thrilled with it; Georgia had just navigated that schedule to a conference championship, so Finebaum on his SEC Network show called Smart “out of line.” (The SEC championship in Atlanta came after three straight home games, so Georgia had been in its home state for almost a month.)

“I probably reacted a little quickly on that, not knowing how convoluted the story (on the stage) was,” Finebaum said. “But it was still a pretty dramatic moment for him.”

Smart was asked last month, after the Tennessee game, why he had been more outspoken this year. He shrugged and said it just has more to do with having more things to be outspoken about.

“The two years previous, I mean, there wasn’t a lot there,” he said. “The year that, we were 14-1 and 15-0, there’s not a lot of complaints. There’s not a lot to fight for. You take care of business on the field and handle your business. You don’t have to say a lot of things.

“That was a pretty unique situation if you’re referring to Texas. I don’t know that I’ve ever been a part of anything like that, and I’m not … I wasn’t upset with them. I just didn’t understand, like, never seen that happen, but I would have said that any year.”

But the next thing Smart said got to the heart of the matter: “I just want to fight for my team and fight for our program because I think we’ve got a deserving group of young men who work really hard, and I’m sure every coach would fight for their guys.”

But this has come amid two years of bad publicity about his program. Ten Georgia players and one staff member have been arrested for driving-related offenses since a January 2023 car crash that killed a player and staff member. There have been arrests for non-driving issues. Given all that, you almost would expect Smart to take the opposite approach and be Mr. Nice Guy as the face of the program.

GO DEEPER

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Finebaum, however, pointed out that Smart has chosen his words much more carefully when it comes to off-field issues.

“The one thing I’ll give him credit for is despite all the bad news in the offseason I think he navigated it very well,” Finebaum said. “And it didn’t seem to become a constant theme, like situations like that at other schools.”

Finebaum has another theory for Smart’s newfound candor: The pressure is gone. There’s no push for a three-peat or before that a repeat or before that trying to get the first national championship.

“Everything felt more tense (before). You could sense the gravity of the moment,” Finebaum said. “That was all gone a couple weeks ago in Athens. It was me against the world, and he seemed to like it very much.”

Smart has used that Georgia-against-the-world narrative before, especially en route to the second championship. It became such a punch line that Smart backed off it a bit. It was harder to play the disrespect card when Georgia was the consensus No. 1 team, even after not three-peating last year.

Then came this season’s run of on-field adversity. Smart took to calling his team the “never say die Dawgs.” They made things hard for themselves and played down to their competition, but there they still hoisted the SEC championship trophy.

Now it’s on to the Playoff where Georgia may be in the perfect position, at least to Smart’s liking: It’s not the favorite, especially having to go to its backup quarterback, so there are plenty of picks out there for the Bulldogs to be one-and-done in the tournament.

GO DEEPER

An expert on Carson Beck timeline: ‘I wouldn’t think he’s playing anytime soon’

Somehow, it could be argued that Georgia is playing with house money.

“Ultimately how the season ends is going to help frame the narrative,” Finebaum said. “If somehow Georgia wins the title with everything they’ve overcome, with the schedule, with the Carson Beck injury, I think it will elevate Georgia to an even higher status. And right now, I think they are at the very top shelf of college football. … But I think if (Georgia) can pull this thing off, it won’t make up for not winning a three-peat, but it’s going to put Georgia into a completely different stratosphere.”

(Top photo: Butch Dill / Getty Images)

Happy holidays, and prepare for the greatest gift: tennis returns tomorrow, December 27.

In the spirit of looking back on the previous season and remembering all the moments big and small that defined it, here is a compendium of tennis stories of all kinds from The Athletic’s tennis writers, Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, with a few guest appearances. This is not a “best of,” but rather a “remember when?” and a “did that really happen?” as well as an opportunity to revisit the stories you may have missed.

Matt will hold up the front end of the year given Charlie’s joining for the full launch of tennis coverage in May. See you next season, or rather, tomorrow.  — James Hansen

“There is nothing quite like a comeback in tennis, a game that essentially punishes players for time away.

Ranking points disappear. There is no job protection the way there might be for an athlete in a team sport, with an organization committed to managing a rehabilitation, if only to salvage value from a contract. There are no practice starts without consequences in the minor leagues to ease the transition back to top-tier competition.

For older players, the game, the practice sessions, the matches, they all hurt more.”

Matt Futterman

“Mirra Andreeva showed up to tennis in the middle of last season, like the new kid at school whose mother or father has just been transferred into the local branch office.

One day, no one had ever heard of her, the next, she’s all anyone is talking about: 16 years old, three days into the online version of her junior year in high school, complaining about the homework and taking over this Australian Open.”

Matt Futterman

“There was Andy Murray (or was it an actor named Fraser McKnight?) looking very serious, sitting for a tell-all interview.

“The players, the matches, it’s all just made up,” he said. “Let’s face it, people are stupid, so they’ll buy anything.”

There was Novak Djokovic coming clean about his true identity as the actor Bert Critchley, practising ripping his shirt in front of a bathroom mirror and discussing his process of getting into character.

“I want to bring truth to Novak,” he said. “What is he thinking, what is he feeling, what would motivate him, if he was a real person?””

Matt Futterman

“Maybe one day his name will become household. Or maybe not. Tennis is a difficult business; only a tiny sample size of its athletes achieve enough to become part of the vernacular. But what Top Nidunjianzan already has done is extraordinary. In the 50 years since the ATP Tour started its singles ranking system, not a single player from Tibet had earned a single ranking point. Nidunjianzan has 20 of them and ranks 869th in the world.”

Dana O’Neil

“For several minutes, Alcaraz stood in the center of the court in his warm-up jacket, conveying his fears to Davis and a tournament supervisor. They assured him the random flying bee he might still see was harmless.

“If I see the bee, I cannot concentrate on the ball,” he told them.

Both are yellow after all.

Matt Futterman

“No one will ever know whether tennis would have experienced a surge in popularity had more of the best players let in the cameras the way some of the biggest stars in F1 and golf have in recent years for Drive to Survive and Full Swing, the golf equivalent. Still, in many ways, the failure of Break Point revealed some of the long-running fractures and countervailing interests throughout tennis, especially at a time when the best players treat access to their lives as their intellectual property.”

Matt Futterman

“We do compete in many countries that certainly reflect different cultures and value systems,” said Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA Tour. “We certainly understand and respect that Saudi is something that provokes some very strong views.”

Matt Futterman

Challengers, Tashi and the film’s director Luca Guadagnino have plenty to say about that metaphysical quandary. They have plenty to say about the aggression-filled flow state two players enter when they are in the middle of a high-octane match, rhythmically pounding and pattering a ball back and forth across a net.

Challengers may not really be a tennis movie — but it has plenty to say about the quintessence of the sport.

Matt Futterman

“One normal day of Corentin Moutet, that’s all we ask. It will never happen.”

James Hansen

“Initially, it was thought that the bottle might have been thrown deliberately because footage of the incident obscured where the bottle had come from. However, video shows the bottle slipping out of a spectactor’s backpack as they bend over to attempt to get the attention of the 24-time Grand Slam champion.”

Charlie Eccleshare

“The knee-jerk reaction is that women don’t bring in as much money as the men and if they did, they wouldn’t be second-class citizens. Yet consider a counter-narrative: during the 55-year history of the sport’s modern era, if women had received the same exposure and investment as men and didn’t have to confront countless barriers and aggressions, maybe they would be bringing in the same amount of money.”

Matt Futterman

“The dominance becomes self-fulfilling once she wins a few games and she and her opponent both feel like they know what’s coming next, so the starts and ends of points become more inevitable; what happens in between is less important.”

Charlie Eccleshare

“The world of invention is full of products and gadgets intended for one purpose that found their groove with another.

Bubble wrap was supposed to be three-dimensional wallpaper. Viagra was a new blood pressure medication. The slinky was a surefire way to secure naval instruments in rough seas.

Umpire-Head-Camera, welcome to the ranks of unintended consequences.”

Matt Futterman

Corentin Moutet was just one of the players to fall victim. (Eurosport)

“The weeks before the French Open had been filled with doubts. He had barely been able to practice. It seemed like what he had experienced during the previous year, and even for some months before that, was coming for him all over again.

Back then, Alcaraz was starting to gain a reputation as a beautiful but possibly brittle player. His young body, so fast and so strong, way beyond the level of most 20/21-year-olds, somehow kept betraying him.”

Matt Futterman

“All the pent-up emotion that Murray must have been feeling for days, weeks, months, even the seven years since he limped off this court with a hip injury against Sam Querrey and was never the same again, could pour out.”

Charlie Eccleshare

“For the second time in five weeks, Paolini, the diminutive Italian, has forced everyone in the sport to forget everything they thought they knew about the modern version of tennis. She has reminded them of one of the things, maybe even the thing, that makes tennis special.”

Matt Futterman

“After Krejcikova left the court, she saw her name next to Novotna’s on the board that lists the champions on a wall inside the All England Club. Emotion overcame her then.

Afterwards, she said she had been dreaming of Novotna lately. In the dreams, they are talking. She didn’t want to say about what.

“It’s a little personal,” she said.”

Matt Futterman

Barbora Krejcikova’s Wimbledon title stretched back into her tennis youth. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

“Andy Murray made you care.

That was his superpower. There were better players in his era; there were more stylish ones. But none possessed the ability to make you invest emotionally in their matches as much as Murray did.”

Charlie Eccleshare

“I have no cartilage in my knees,” Bopanna repeated several times during a recent interview, emphasizing the absurdity of what he has accomplished despite all that. He shook his head. He shrugged his shoulders. Then he recalled asking a relative, a yoga teacher, if she could help.

At the time, it was not a particularly serious question. The answer ended up changing his life.

Matt Futterman

Aged seven, Zheng went to Wuhan with her father to play in front of a coach. She impressed so much that she would stay there to train — alone.

“Now I can tell him I made history,” she said, beaming with the brightest of smiles.

Matt Futterman

“Djokovic went to the center of the court and knelt in prayer, crossing his chest, his closed eyes looking skyward with his arms raised in the air. He crouched on the clay, crying more, his hands trembling.”

Matt Futterman

“All of these processes follow the Tennis Anti-Doping Program (TADP) regulations. But that hasn’t stopped the fury from Sinner’s fellow players.”

Charlie Eccleshare

“Gauff knows this isn’t about just about her. During her lifetime, Black Americans have become some of the biggest stars in tennis and in some cases have transcended the sport, especially in the U.S.”

Matt Futterman

“Most people can envisage dating someone who does the same job or works for the same company. But most people’s jobs don’t involve travelling the world to play a very selfish sport in front of thousands of people, sometimes with — or even against — your partner.”

Charlie Eccleshare

It was a summer of love in tennis in 2024. (Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)

“How did that chirpy teenager suddenly get to this middle-age existence, wife and kids and in-law dinners, wearing the status of millennial tennis wise man?

Where does life, his and ours, go?”

Matt Futterman

“Muchova has come from a place that no tennis player wants to go. After that surgery in February, on the area of the body tennis players most dread becoming damaged, Muchova worried she might not play the sport again.”

Charlie Eccleshare

“Something about the human backboard nature of her play, the hard (but not too hard), flat power of ball after ball after ball opposing off her racket. The beauty of her game, her economic and elegant movement, and the subtle scything of her forehand almost go unnoticed.

She is plenty steady, sure, but that doesn’t begin to describe her. Stealthy is more like it.”

Matt Futterman

“Sabalenka can be funny and bubbly off the court but has a temper to match her athletic gifts on it, and an obduracy that follows her out of the tramlines too. When the stress ramped up, she would get so hot she could barely breathe or function, let alone serve.

That is when it helps to have someone with a background in martial arts: a discipline in controlling your breathing and your emotions when you are facing someone beating the crap out of you.”

Matt Futterman

“Both are so quick that they look like they could be Olympic sprinters, and where Alcaraz lunges and bends like his limbs are putty, Sinner dives and twirls like a superhero escaping from a burning building.”

Charlie Eccleshare

“Forlan expected to spend much of his retirement honing his golf game, but instead has found himself drawn back to tennis. Nothing else gives him the same satisfaction as the sport that, along with football, he excelled at in his youth.”

Diego Forlan’s professional debut was one of the less likely stories of the year. (Kevin Santamaria / Tenis al Maximo)

“When the WTA go to Saudi, I would say they should adopt a political prisoner’s case and take it on and say ‘OK, we’re going, but we are also advocating for them. And Manahel al-Otaibi (the jailed fitness instructor) is the closest case you could have to sports. Say, ‘We are happy to be in Saudi. We’re happy that Saudi women are to now play tennis. But what about Manahel al-Otaibi?’”

Charlie Eccleshare

“Jannik Sinner is trying to speak, but his own name is resounding too loudly across the Inalpi Arena in Turin. Lit up on billboards, written on placards, chanted across the aisles. Sinner, the first Italian to achieve the men’s world No. 1 ranking, isn’t just the featured attraction of the ATP Tour Finals tournament in his home country: He is the tournament, on the court and off it.”

Matt Futterman

“Instead of letting her serve become a complete albatross, Errani has used her ground skills, tactical nous and the shock factor of a serve that regularly registers around 60mph (96.5kph) on the speed gun to reach the very top of tennis in singles and doubles.”

Charlie Eccleshare

“For two decades, whatever outrageous fortune controls tennis injuries kept slinging arrows at Rafael Nadal.

When the Spaniard finally raised his white flag last month, he admitted defeat to an opponent he had vanquished not just in his later years but for two decades, until he couldn’t win the battle any more.”

Matt Futterman

Rafael Nadal’s retirement was one of many that defined the year. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)

“Both Swiatek’s one-month suspension and the decision not to ban Jannik Sinner for his two positive tests for clostebol, an anabolic steroid, have been conducted according to ITIA protocol. Both cases have also revealed deep wells of mistrust and anger within tennis from fans and players alike, confused at players being allowed to play while under investigation. Everything has been done by the book. The book appears in need of a rewrite.”

Matt Futterman

“I wasn’t alone,” she said. “It wasn’t something wrong with me.”

Matt Futterman

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s my boyfriend’s birthday. Like happy birthday. I love you.’ And then, boom!

“It was so normal for me that I didn’t think about it.”

Charlie Eccleshare and Matt Futterman

(Top photo: Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)