Georgia football has leaned into the rise or fall of teams and companies for lessons that it can use as it chases championships.

Last year it was the New Zealand’s All Black rugby team with slogans like Better Never Rests.

Coach Kirby Smart has talked about the fall of Blockbuster Video and how it didn’t adapt to survive.

This year, Georgia is using a theme tied into Nike — the shoe and apparel giant whose swoosh is on Georgia’s uniforms — for its team building offseason skull sessions as it looks to win another national title after championships in 2021 and 2022.

Phil Knight’s company’s origin story includes the design of a waffle iron that was used for the shoe’s waffle sole. Smart mentioned Knight’s 2016 book “Shoe Dog,” and is embracing their mantra to “Assume Nothing.”

“For us, assume nothing is as little as, do you know everyone on your team’s name?” Smart said Monday night at at appearance at the Macon Touchdown Club in a video posted to YouTube by the Middle Georgia Sports Report.

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Smart uses outside help — usually Greenville, S.C.-based sports psychologist Drew Brannon — for his yearly mantras.

“I think I have a close relationship with Nike and Phil Knight,” Smart said Tuesday. “I’ve been on a trip with him for six or seven consecutive years. We have so much respect for him and his wife and what he’s done with his business. I thought it was really cool when the opportunity came up to study their success. You want to be successful, study successful people. And they have certainly been that.”

Smart said he called a mid-year enrollee — a five-star — who had been on a campus three months and asked him if he could name the players in the front row where the seniors sit.

“He named about 10 out of 20,” Smart said. “I said, assume nothing. When you meet someone, you repeat their name. You say their name. A name has history in it. Our players got up, each player, one at a time. We did it for three weeks and they told me their name.”

Smart told the players he was named after a grandfather who fought in a war. His middle name Paul was came from a parent’s college roommate.

“When you learn that about someone, you being to connect to them,” Smart said. “Connection is part of our DNA. So assume nothing.”

Jared Wilson, who is moving into the starting center job, applied the slogan to what happens on the field.

“Especially I would say at the center position, you can’t assume something is going to happen,” Wilson said Tuesday. “I feel like everything happens within a split second. So if you assume something’s going to happen, then the complete opposite will end up happening.”

Smart Monday night told the story of a top 2023 NFL prospect from Georgia that flew in for a team visit and treated it more like a college recruiting visit than a job interview. He said the team’s general manager told him about it.

The player went to dinner with the general manager, head coach and position coach and then came in the next morning and had breakfast with them and was asked before he left if he could tell them their names.

“He couldn’t name one of them,” Smart said. “For me, I reflected that as I failed that young man. For all the stuff we taught him…somewhere in that you missed repeating someone’s name for yourself or saying sir, I can’t remember your name, what’s your name?”

Smart said his team has won 46 of their its 48 games because they assumed nothing − including in-game scenarios − could pop up.

“Assuming things doesn’t create the best outcomes for everybody," inside linebacker Jalon Walker said. "We’re focusing on their longevity of being a great company. Here at the University of Georgia, we're focusing on our longevity of having a successful football program. So watching and learning what they did over the years, that was just a model that we can follow.”

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Georgia football embracing 'Assume Nothing' for 2024 football season