Jimmy Smith takes the Georgia Tech running backs room into 2026, with a veteran-heavy group to develop

Georgia Tech’s running back room is entering the 2026 season with a new on-field voice. Jimmy Smith, stepping into his first year as the Yellow Jackets’ running backs coach, used Friday’s practice as a baseline for how he plans to handle a deep group of tailbacks and change the room’s habits without changing its identity overnight.

The promise of Smith’s first season is that he inherits a “loaded” position group, at least in personnel terms, and he has multiple players who have been on the roster and have room to grow under a dedicated assistant. In the discussion after Friday’s work, the names highlighted included Justice Haynes, Malachi Hosley, J.P. Powell and Trelain Maddox, along with additional backs Smith is expected to work into the rotation as the preseason progresses.

At this stage of camp, a running backs coach’s job is less about dramatic scheme changes and more about fundamentals that show up later: maintaining pad level through contact, running with tempo through the mesh point, and improving the small decisions that create lanes or protect against negative plays. Smith’s first-year context matters because those details often take longer when a coach is new to the program’s week-to-week routine, the offense’s terminology, and the staff’s expectations for ball security, pass protection assignments, and route responsibilities in whatever package the team chooses to use.

For players, the practical question is how quickly a room can standardize its execution. When multiple backs are present, reps become the currency, and each player’s growth plan has to fit within the same practice structure. Smith’s challenge is to develop competition without confusing roles, so that the player who needs more carries for rhythm gets them, while others build a clearer path to meaningful snaps through their work in other areas such as pass sets, spacing, and out-of-break timing.

Justice Haynes and Malachi Hosley, along with J.P. Powell and Trelain Maddox, represent the kind of variety that makes a backfield feel “loaded.” Even without assigning specific statistical benchmarks, a coach entering a season needs different styles of runners, different strengths in short-yardage and different levels of experience in the passing game. In a camp setting, that usually translates into tailored feedback during individual and group sessions, followed by consistent reinforcement during full-team work.

The reality for a first-year position coach is that the earliest measurable progress comes from repetition and clarity. What you watch for over the coming weeks is whether the backfield looks more synchronized in the timing-based parts of the offense, whether ball security holds steady during higher-contact drills, and whether backs take the same responsibility for their blocking assignments from practice to practice. Those are the visible signs that a coach’s teaching has landed with the players.

Georgia Tech’s 2026 season will not be defined solely by the running game, but the quality of the backfield development often determines how much flexibility an offense has. If Smith can turn the room into a dependable group of options, the Yellow Jackets can ask for more from their run-pass combinations and keep defenders from keying on one type of runner. For now, the focus is straightforward: convert practice work into dependable execution, and do it fast enough that multiple backs earn their roles by performance rather than simply by opportunity.

Because the available reporting centers on what Smith said after Friday’s practice, some specifics about individual roles and how many backs will start the season ahead of others are not confirmed here. Still, the names the coach highlighted suggest he intends to build around that core group early, then sort out the rotation through camp-to-fall continuity.