Scott Cochran has revealed the reason he abruptly left the Georgia football staff after four seasons in February.

The former Alabama head strength coach — who had been on Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs staff in various capacities since 2020 — told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a story published Friday that he has become a full-time advocate for addiction recovery. With Georgia politics veteran Jeff Breedlove, Cochran has formed the American Addiction Recovery Association, which has ambitions of becoming a national organization.

“I’m big on nerves. I’m big on controlling nerves. … “You always get butterflies,” the famously energetic Cochran told the AJC. “The key is to get them to fly in formation. But if you’re not nervous and anxious, I don’t think it’s important to you.”

Addiction, of course, is a topic that hits close to home for Cochran. He battled a dependence on painkillers, he said, throughout his time at Alabama and after he left to join the Georgia staff in 2020.

The 45-year-old Cochran told the AJC he decided to get help after an April 2020 incident in which his wife, Cissy, found him unconscious. “She found me dead,” he says.

Cochran said part of the reason he left Alabama after 13 years — and five national championships under Nick Saban — was for a change of scenery in hopes of beating his addiction. He first began taking painkillers, he said, as a way to deal with migraines, and eventually was crushing and snorting opiates he obtained both through prescriptions and illegally.

He left Alabama to become special teams coordinator at Georgia, but the COVID pandemic that began in March 2020 kept him isolated and fed his addiction. After he collapsed at home that spring, he entered a rehab facility in Massachusetts, something only he and his wife knew about at the time.

Cochran was back using shortly thereafter, however — including partaking of the powerful and dangerous painkiller, fentanyl. In late June of 2021, he was encouraged to tell Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart — his close friends since their days on Saban’s staff at LSU — about his addiction.

“I literally said the words, ‘I am a drug addict,’” Cochran said. “And you could just hear the air come out of his voice.

“And I started getting emotional. I said, ‘I’ve been battling this a long time.’”

Cochran returned to rehab in Massachusetts, and this time stayed sober for more than two years. However, he relapsed during the 2023 season — he stepped down from a full-time coaching job to become a special teams analyst — and returned to rehab this past January.

Cochran resigned from his Georgia job in February, and soon after met Breedlove — also an addiction survivor who once worked for such well-known politicians as Gov. Nathan Deal and Congressman Bob Barr — after speaking at a recovery event. The two talked about “filling a gap (Breedlove) saw in the recovery advocacy world” and joined together to form AARA.

Cochran is president of AARA; Breedlove is CEO. The organization, according to the AJC, will “join the voices of addicts and their families” to “advocate for better addiction recovery programs in the private sector and for addiction recovery funding.”