It’s hard to come up with a better example of “it seemed like a good idea at the time” thinking than Coach Dodd’s decision to take Georgia Tech out of the SEC.
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“We remember the Sugar Bowl, I think it my junior year of high school, we let Alabama beat us twice,” Brinson said of a team that also lost to the Crimson Tide in the SEC Championship game. “We’re not letting Alabama beat us twice. In the Sugar Bowl in 2018, they… thought they should have been in the playoffs and lost to Texas.” -- AB-H, 12/27/23
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Get The Picture · Bloviation for the Dawgnation
Get The Picture 
Hate to see it. Nah.
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There will be no regression to the mean, nerds. There will just be mean. The days in the 70s/80s/90s when you could muster 3 wins every 10 games will seem as successful as the height of the Roman Empire compared to what’s coming. Forget winning. Good luck getting a score. And by good luck, I mean bad luck. Hope you like bagels!
FTMF. 🙂
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Haven’t been to a WH lately, when did coach 404 put bagels on the menu…AND TA HELL WITH GEORGIA TECH!…GO DAWGS!
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Administrators have a long, illustrious history of tripping over their own dicks.
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It wasn’t an administer who was the force behind the decision to leave the SEC. It was Bobby Dodd’s doing. Tech was a power going to bowl games regularly during Josh Pate’s fantasy era of just a few bowls. In the days of no NFL closer to Atlanta than Washington and no major league baseball Tech games were the biggest sporting events in Atlanta. Dodd believed that Tech would be the Notre Dame of the south and Tech could keep all is bowl money rather than sharing it with undeserving likes of Mississippi State.
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Yep. And I believe it was Mississippi State along with Ole Miss who wouldn’t let Tech back into the SEC when they asked.
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Bill Curry tells a story about being the messenger between the Bear and Dodd. Bear wanted to bury the hatchet and sent Curry to tell Dodd that he’d personally sponsor Tech to return to the SEC. Dodd apparently took up the offer of reconciliation but remarked that the Mississippi schools would never allow them back in.
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A quick google of “ole miss bobby dodd” leads to a story with this quote:
“Whatever is there to go to Mississippi for?” Dodd was quoted as saying. “We like to take our fans to exciting places and Mississippi isn’t one.”
That sounds about right. Tech’s hero Bobby Dodd was a hell of a coach, but he was apparently as smug as their fans and paid the price.
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That’s some Phil Mickleson levels of tone deafness right there.
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Also, the man clearly never stopped to appreciate the scenery in Oxford.
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I do enjoy the fact that his decision to shun the lowly Mississippi universities directly led to his beloved program becoming Mississippi State, though. Good stuff.
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Becoming Mississippi State? They wish they would be that successful now. They have basically fallen to the level of a FCS program.
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Georgia Tech has a more recent SEC football championship than Mississippi State. MSU won the SEC football championship in 1941.
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When your best argument is “Tech won the SEC more recently than Miss St,” you’ve already lost the argument. Tech sucks. FTMF. 🙂
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isn’t their telling of it that Bear Bryant oversigned ? And basically that the SEC was just too corrupt for their righteous ass ?
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Yep. That was Tech’s side of the story, and throw in a dash of the Tech / Bama game where a Tech player fair caught a punt but a Bama player went ahead and hit the Tech player in the face, causing him to be hospitalized for a while. IIRC, that was the origin of the Bobby Dodd / Bear Bryant feud.
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I wish I knew more about the politics of the MLB & NFL expansion into Atlanta, because Tech went independent in ’64 & BOTH the Braves and Falcons arrived in ’66. From here in 2022, it seems like the pro leagues sensed blood in the water and went for the kill. Surely Dodd would have heard rumors about the pro leagues moving in and decided he would just ignore them?
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it wasn’t a matter of the pro leagues “smelling blood in the water” it was a combination of aggressive Atlanta business leaders” boosterism plus a Virginia territory from South Carolina through Mississippi.
The Atlanta Commerce Club types for years were trying to do what they could to promote Atlanta as a national business center. I don’t mean inducing General Motors to move its headquarters to Atlanta but to induce Fortune 500s to have Atlanta offices and increase commerce here. Part of the image they tried to promote was that Atlanta was a “Major League City.” But, it needed a major league team to call itself a Major league city.
What Ivan Allen and Mills Lane of the former C&S Bank decided to build a stadium on speculation then find teams to fill it. Not only did Allen and Lane tell teams that they would get the keys to a modern (for the time) stadium but also instant Fandom throughout the entire southeastern region of the United States. The radio rights to do many homes would be valuable.
The Braves, in competition for rights and fans with 2 Chicago teams. bit and decided to take advantage.
The AFL and NFL was looking to expand at that time. as well, and the same factors made Atlanta appealing, too. The AFL offered a local group an AFL franchise; the NFL decided it wanted the area. so it quickly offered. The Atlanta group correctly concluded the NFL rights were more valuable and took the NFL offer. The AFL then sold the rights to a Miami group and it became the Dolphins.
I don’t think the Atlanta business community or the pro leagues thought there was “blood in the water.” Instead, MLB and NFL thought that the region wide fanbase and media rights base combined with a new stadium was worth taking.
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You forgot to mention that Tech sucks.
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That’s just Chantastic…GO DAWGS!
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Not only are they getting their ass kicked by us in the series since they left but the conference they joined absolutely sucks (financially and competitively)…
UGA = major leagues
ACC = AA(maybe – & remove clemson and that league is low A ball)
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Tech fans I know understand their place in the state of Georgia football.
Any day GT loses is a great day for America.
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Ah, yes, Dodd arrogantly thinking that Georgia Tech was the Notre Dame of the South, and thus feeling that Georgia tech as an individual institution was superior than the collective SEC. And yet Georgia Tech fans continue to place him on such a lofty pedestal, even though he single-handedly led the program to a certain slow death.
Ever know someone in your personal or professional life who, after some success, immediately abandons all sense of reality and proceeds with a sense of narcissism and entitlement? That was Bobby Dodd back in the ’60s.
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Response:
Your first sentence: Amen.
Your second sentence: Amen.
Your third sentence: Amen.
Your fourth sentence: Amen, Amen, Amen.
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Dodd really was an incredible snob. Even if you give him some credit—as I do—for sticking to his principled objections to the SEC’s “140 rule,” he indeed had this idea that Tech was too good for the rest of the conference, to the point where he wouldn’t even play Ole Miss or Mississippi State. (To this day, there are Tech fans who believe UGA blocked Tech’s attempts to rejoin the SEC because we’re “afraid” of them, but no, it was the Mississippi schools holding a somewhat understandable grudge.)
Ironic that Dodd was responsible for the greatest period of sustained success in Tech’s history, but also for setting the program on a course for irrelevance. Basically, he fucked around, and Tech football found out.
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The previous AD to the mouthbreather they have now polled the Tech fanbase about football. One of the overwhelming responses was that they wanted to play SEC rivals. He went out and scheduled H/H with Vandy, MSU, and Ole Miss.
Tech had NEVER played MSU while in the SEC, and only played Ole Miss once.
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Their run of home losses to Georgia has really become staggering. Their ’99 win (set aside the officiating) was vacated due to probation so you have to go back to 1989 to find a win in Bobby Dodd Stadium for Tech. Imagine going 40 years without a win over your in-state rival in your stadium. That could legitimately be heading Tech’s way after just a few more beat downs in Bobby Dodd.
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And the ‘99 win was only a win because it was so long ago that review didn’t even exist yet. Sanks didn’t fumble.
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Hell, Sanks was so clearly down that the refs blew the play dead while one of our linemen was fixing to tackle the guy who picked the ball up. Who, by the way, had picked it up at the one before stepping back into the endzone with it. If it was a fumble, then they should’ve let the play continue — which would’ve been a safety. A truly historic ******.
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Honestly at this point, GT seems like a G5 school functionally that’s fortunate to be in a P5 conference. They certainly don’t contribute anything to the ACC’s coffers. I don’t think GA State (or any other recognized G5 school) would have a worse record if they were in the ACC.
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Vandy says “hold my beer”.
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Vandy has a dominant baseball team in a conference that loves and excels in baseball. Tech doesn’t have that.
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Vandy is great in baseball because they don’t have the scholarship limitations other schools do. Vandy can sign as many players as they want and put them all on full scholarship since the scholarships are paid out of their endowment and not subject to NCAA scholarship limits.
The tech baseball team has historically been pretty good. Not world beater good but on par with Georgia.
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Vandy would definitely more than 9 total wins in the last 3 years if they were in the ACC
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Probably true.
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Dodd’s version of Paradise Lost: better to reign as an independent than to serve in the SEC. To hell with Tech.
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Unpopular opinion: based on recruiting proximity and conference weakness, the right coach could win there pretty quickly.
Of course, that would require the trade school to care about football. Which they don’t appear to do. Sad.
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May be, Tennessee looked better this year than I ever thought they could – A real coach at Tech with a couple of dynamite recruiters could get them going again pretty quickly.
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The transfer portal allows programs to load back up fast, and the right coach might be able to attract some guys who got blocked at their first program and are willing to suffer through being on the Flats for a season or maybe two knowing that the NFL will be the payoff. Tech certainly doesn’t have that coach now, but if they ever got serious and pulled someone in they could overcome some of their disadvantages with rental players. In turn, a short run of success might help attract high school talent.
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Apparently the players didn’t have to take calculus back in Dodd’s day.
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Coach Dodd told me that GT could play UCLA, USC or ND and still get 7 to 9 wins each year. Then they would go to a great bowl game and everything would be OK.
I did not think this was a great idea but what us a 16-17 year old going to say except, “Yes Sir.”
Bear Bryant did every thing he could to get GT back in the SEC. Just too much bad blood. The answer was No.
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Without the Drought, we still run this state before the exit from the SEC.
The Drought is a stain on college football history. Time for Kirby to remove that stain in 2025.
Booby Dudd can kma.
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What a stat.
Let’s not put this all at Dodd’s feet. Tech is by all accounts a miserable place to go to college. Miserable coursework, miserable social life, miserable location. Hard to compete for elite players when the value of an engineering degree is nil for them.
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Bobby Dodd was NIL before NIL. He encouraged his players to get married. The player’s wife would then wind up with an overpaid job at some ‘sponsoring’ company in Atlanta. Heard this from more than one GT player from my old high school.
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BD was a man before his time….arranged marriages are the norm at GT nowadays
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Ouch!
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I feel like there’s some Wikipedia “context needed” here – most of those SEC years for Tech were when Georgia didn’t even have a stadium. But, yeah, if the purpose of this tweet and discussion is to point out what a hilarious moron Bobby Dodd was for thinking the world would beat a path to his door when he pulled Tech out of the SEC, I’m here for it. He’s patient zero for the hubris that still inexplicably infects those people. Pride went before the fall, indeed.
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Agreed with the vast majority of Dodd posts and I posted not long ago GT football has been a comedy of errors from leaving the SEC to how they handled tickets and stadium renovations.
I don’t blame the Mississippi schools for holding a grudge. However in this day of expanding conferences and possibly cramped schedules, I would gladly trade the ACC South Carolina for GT.
BTW GT has only place Ole Miss 4 times, only once as a conference game. The other 3 were bowls granted 1 was an all SEC Sugar Bowl.
GT’s 1st trip to Starkville was 2009.
They really are and have been a group of self absorbed snobs. I am glad UGA has been expanding their engineering school.
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Georgia Tech should never have access to SEC resources, and I’ll happily visit Charleston every other year for a long weekend with a brief ride over to Columbia on Saturday.
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South Carolina is the ACC’s GT with less history, and prestige in every way.
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Counterpoint: Fuck Tech
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And to pile on a little here (always a good thing where Yech is involved), it’s worth pointing out that those arrogant SOBs played Auburn yearly before, during, and after their SEC days. Every game from 1906-1959 was AT YECH. Finally, in 1960 Yech played them in Birmingham. They didn’t go to Auburn until 1970.
Similarly, piling on with the arrogance theme, though not in the SEC, Yech played Clemscum 41 times between 1902 and 1973. ALL of these games were in Atlanta. They did not play at Clemson until 1974.
Tuck Fech.
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Yeah, that big (at the time) stadium won them a lot of games in the first half of the 20th century – it’s easy to look like a dominant program when you play everyone at home and never have to go on the road. It’s a fitting karmic balancing act that the stadium is now tiny and is one of the things holding them back in recruiting.
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Still super pissed about those 14.
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at least 4 of them never should have happened. ’98 and ’99 were ridiculous miscarriages of justice and both ’14 and ’16 were choke jobs after Georgia decided the games were over. That ’08 game never should have happened, either.
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Reshad Jones coming at you with a patented shoulder-bump out of bounds like a …. whooops not out of bounds, and the ballcarrier is racing down the sideline!
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My eye just twitched.
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Not just that, but they kept lining up a WR wide in an ineligible receiver and we kept running downfield with him, allowing the back to come around the end with no traffic.
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The ones that I remember or happened since I became a fan are 89,90,98,99,00,14 and 16. That means that in the last 30 years it has only gotten less competitive. They have won 7 times in 32 meetings. As the great Jesco White once said “that is pretty damn good.”
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Already covered; but it was more than just leaving the SEC that led to a 14-43 disadvantage; but now, more than ever, with the ACC stuck in a really-really bad contact with ESPN for more than a decade and the SEC about to implement a $3B deal with ESPN – they are screwed..
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Serious question: The record in COFH currently stands at Georgia 69 (nice), Tech 41, and four ties. Which happens first: Georgia getting to 100 wins in the series, or Tech getting to 50?
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It’s a good question. If we keep up the pace we’ve been on since Richt arrived (85 percent win percentage vs. Tech) we’d be to 100 in 37 years, with Tech being still below 50. The series would be 100-47 at that point.
If I had to put money on it, I’d make us a small favorite to hit 100 before they hit 50 in the series. It’s a staggering change when you consider Tech led the head to head record in the early 60s.
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It happens in a 49 – 0 rout in Atlanta at beautiful Mark Richt field in 2059. UGA hits 100 wins in the same year they collect 10 wins in a row equaling the all time mark set by HOF Coach Kirby Smart in 2027!
Five years later they make the decision to follow fellow founding member of the SEC, Sewanee and give up college football altogether!
And to Hell with Ga. tech
FTMF
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I would rather not ever lose to that bunch ever again.
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Sewanee still plays football. They are D-III.
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Does anybody remember that goofball with a forum name of ‘St Simons’, that used to come on the AJC page way back when Tech beat us that season and every single day he would throw up the score and say, “Glad it still hurts”. ?? I just wonder if he is still alive or if he’s taken an overdose of Valium or something in the last few seasons…lol. Since Tech’s last win, by a whopping 1 point back in 2016, the combine score of our last 4 victories is 180-35. I’m sure that still ‘hurts’ ol St Simons, wherever he’s at…lol.
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Next big move for tech should be out of P5 into AAC (not much of a drop) then declare KSU your instate rival and drop UGA! They still loose most every year but don’t have too watch their stadium turn Red the last game every other year!
This is of course on their way to dropping football altogether!
FTMF
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Well I will tell you at the time they left they were a national name but the real reason Dobb pulled out was a young coach named Vince Dooley. Dobb read the handwriting on the wall. While they were more or less forced to play us every year he knew Dooley was no Johnny Griffith and there was not going to be any more cake walks.
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Good sounding theory but Johnny Griffith was the UGA coach when Bobby Dodd decided to go independent. He wasn’t afraid of Johnny Griffith.
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In dishonor of Dumbash Dodd’s dumbash mistake, they really should just name the entire stadium after Mark Richt.
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69, you’re close..
Lookie here, the truth…
Boobie Dudd was a decent one-platoon football coach. In one-platoon football, you could have a very good team with 3 outstanding players, 3 good players, and 5 ok players.
Ole Boobie Dudd could recruit that spread all day in the late ’40’s to the early ’60s at the north ave. trade school in Atlanta.
In the late ’50s, as the SEC schools upgraded coaches, Bryant to Alabama, Dietzel at LSU, Johnny Vaught at Ole Miss, the spiral into poor football began at the north ave. trade school.
Then,
As one-platoon football turned into two-platoon football, and the Dudd would have to recruit more outstanding players,
something fantastic happened at the University of Georgia!
Vince Dooley was hired as the Head Football Coach and promptly defeated ole Boobie Dudd in ’64, ’65, and ’66 (which was supposed to be one of the Dudd’s best teams)!!
Ole Boobie Dudd quit the SEC in 1964, in 1966, ole Boobie Dudd quit the north ave. trade school because he couldn’t compete against Vince Dooley and UGA.
Then in 1988, the Georgia State Board of Regents voted to add the name of a two-time quitter to the football field in Atlanta, permanently reminding all who would you rather associate with?…
Champions or quitters?!!
Thus, dear Senator Blutarsky fans, the reason for the stats the Senator highlighted…
Two-platoon football, better coaches in the SEC, and Vincent the Great led to a supposedly good coach becoming a two-time quitter and leaving stains on the flats!!
As always…
TUCK FECH!!
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