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Marc Weiszer
 |  mweiszer@onlineathens.com If UGA’s football season gets underway as scheduled on Sept. 26, Kirby Smart will be going up against the coach he brought to Athens who built a mammoth offensive line considered among the best in the nation during his time.

Sam Pittman signaled he’s not content to just ground and pound as Arkansas’ head coach.

“I don’t think you can just turn around down after down and hand the ball off to the tailback and say, ‘Hey, let’s go, sic ‘em,”’ Pittman, the former Bulldogs offensive line coach, said last December at his introductory press conference. “You might be able to do it in the third and fourth quarter. What we want is we want to be versatile. I love the RPO game. I like the quarterback read game. I like 11—which is one tight end and three wideouts. I like to throw the flash screens that is into the RPO system.”

Arkansas will see the UGA debut of coordinator Todd Monken. He was brought in to improve an offense that under James Coley last season and Jim Chaney the three seasons before that tried to take advantage of a roster that had future early round NFL draft picks at running back in Nick Chubb, Sony Michel and D’Andre Swift and offensive linemen Andrew Thomas, Isaiah Wilson and Isaiah Wynn.

Producing those talented backs has Georgia proud to stake a claim as ‘RBU,’ but coach Kirby Smart nearly bristled on the eve of preseason camp when it was suggested that Monken might be asked to “put his fingerprints on the Georgia way so to speak?”

Smart wondered what that meant? “Running the ball a lot, I guess,” a reporter told him. “Play-action maybe.”

“Running the ball a lot? OK,” Smart said. “I believe in doing what you have to do to win. So I’m going to let you define it how you feel comfortable defining it and then I’m going to define it with the way that gives us the best chance of success. We want to get the best football players we can on the field. We want to be able to score points. We think it takes that to win games and that’s never been any issue with me. I’ve never gotten on an offensive coordinator’s headphones and said ‘Please run the ball right here. Please run the ball right here.’ That’s never been the case. Unfortunately, I think some people might believe that but that’s not my goal. It’s to score points. I’ve never said ‘please don’t score more points, please don’t score.” I’ve never done that.”