No worries, Bill. Georgia Tech means never having to say you’re sorry.
No apology necessary
Filed under Georgia Tech Football
- Bloviation for the Dawgnation
-
Quote Of The Day
-
“Those 13 jerseys are going to be around a long time.”-- Brock Bowers, The Athletic, 1/10/23
Search
Categories
Archives
Blogroll (ND)
- 82 Sluggo Win
- And The Valley Shook
- Banner Society
- Black Heart Gold Pants
- Black Shoe Diaries
- Blatant Homerism
- Braves & Birds
- Brophy Football
- College Football Talk
- EDSBS
- Eleven Warriors
- Lost Angeles
- MGoBlog
- RazorBloggers Network
- Rock M Nation
- Rocky Top Talk
- Saturday Down South
- Saturday Tradition
- Shakin The Southland
- Smart Football
- Team Speed Kills
- The National Championship Issue
- The Wizard of Odds
- Tide Bits
Dawg Blogs
Dawg Links
Media Links
Stats/Info Links
- All-Time Division 1-A CFB Standings
- American College Football
- American College Football – Rankings
- cfbstats.com
- College Football at Sports-Reference.com
- College Football by the Numbers
- College Football Data Warehouse
- College Football Recruiting Map
- College Nicknames
- Football Outsiders – College
- Football Study Hall
- GBE College Football Ratings
- MapGameDay.com
- NCAA Division I Football Statistics
- SEC Statistics
- Statistically Speaking
- Strangestbrew's College Football Schedulizer
- The Helmet Project
- Varsity Numbers
Useful Links
Time, time…
GATA
@MummePoll
- @ParrishWalton Gap is everything. published 1 month ago
- @DawgStats @jontweetssports @DawgOutWest @100Sanford @mygodapodcast @Gators_Hater @GPoole_BI @dsearcy3 It may be ti… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… published 1 month ago
- @csm1976 Oy. published 1 month ago
- @BlatantHomerism You can't summarize the last 25 years of college football any better. published 1 month ago
- @BlatantHomerism “We’ve sold our souls to the devil,” says one athletic director, “but we love our paycheck.” published 1 month ago
Blog Stats
- 69,848,531 hits
Get The Picture · Bloviation for the Dawgnation
Get The Picture 
GT has gone from a once-proud football program to styrofoam peanuts for SEC schedules
LikeLiked by 3 people
I never thought I’d see the day when their football team AND their basketball team were in ruins.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I hate Fech…to start with…but the data supports my lack of concern about our defense going into this season. Adding Boom to the defensive staff, and stockpiling depth defensively, is the best salve for losing great talent to the draft.
Kirby has a plan, and in the words of the great Erik Russell, “We have no alternate plan”
“Another Saturday tradition which has meant so much to me over the years can be stated very simple: “THERE AIN’T NOTHING LIKE BEING A BULLDOG ON SATURDAY NIGHT —– AFTER WINNING A FOOTBALL GAME”. I mean like whipping Tennessee’s ass to start with, then ten more and another one.
This is the Game Plan. We have no alternate plan.” Erik
LikeLiked by 6 people
Erk
LikeLike
Fun question: if we hadn’t had any of the players we lose from last year- no Walkers, no Davis, no Wyatt, no Dean- and our current roster was being looked at strictly on who’s going to be there and not just the Mookie and Wilson factor, how would we look?
I’d love to see a projection of our 2022 defense that wasn’t mainly about our 2021 defense.
LikeLiked by 8 people
No doubt the brilliant sports pundits would still Dawgrade this defense…they’d invent some BS reason…the fact that Kirby & crew didn’t go a “portaling” speaks volumes…these will be some mean Junkyard Dawgs this season, no doubt
LikeLiked by 4 people
Did y’all feel that? I think it was Dan Lanning’s eye twitching.
LikeLiked by 4 people
They’ll be”blackened” by the evening of 9/3
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m picking on Lanning, knowing that he knows what Georgia has better than any other coach we’ll face this season. A national Championship team with a chip on it’s shoulder and an off season of pent up aggression probably looks like an oncoming locomotive.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Uncle Got, it’s Friday…how about a little musical flashback? A couple months back you posted an old clip from Austin City Limits…for some reason that made me think of John Prine…and then my warped mind remembered this ditty
LikeLiked by 1 person
Love it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Great tune, FD. That was played during the credits of Daddy And Them, a Billy Bob Thornton movie.
Andy Griffith had a great line in it.
“I dreamed you was getting cornholed by them white boys up at the jail”
LikeLiked by 1 person
RR, you are spot on. Billybob asked him to write this song for the ending of that movie…Mayberry would have been so different if Sheriff Andy would have been like dad in that movie
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, there’s 2 hours of my life I’ll never get back. Holy shit a satire of a Montgomery, Alabama suburb. What will Billy Bob think of next…
LikeLike
I love Bill C. But if there are 16 better historical defenses than last year’s Dawgs, I’ll eat my hat.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Especially if you consider how the game has changed. Offense is much more wide open now than “back in the day”. With the video game numbers that are put up now, it makes what last year’s defense did look even better. Put that bunch on the field 25 years ago and they would have looked even more impressive. Having the size and the speed with less of the field to defend…..well it would not have been very pretty for any of the opponent.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This list is truly awful. The exclusion of the 2017 team, which allow like 13 points per game prior to the Oklahoma game and was every bit as game as the top-ranked Alabama D from that period. And the 2021 D was literally right there alongside early 2000’s Miami and Alabama 2011 in terms of its body of work.
LikeLike
My benefit of the doubt to those rankings is that the wiser pundit probably goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid recency bias…. to the point of, ironically, doubling down on bias against recency.
LikeLike
Here’s a funny thing about tech:
Good hires are the hardest thing to do in college football. I figure about 1 for 3 on hires is a pretty good record for most programs: One Spurrier, one Hall and a Zook. One Meyer, one MustChomp and a McElwain. (Then they kept screwing up, but that’s another conversation).
Tech had a run of good hires who used the program as the stepping stone it should always aspire to be: Curry and Ross both leveraged it into honest labor elsewhere (Bama and the NFL), then Lewis was a bad blip, but then the Skipper (Notre Dame). I would argue, in hindsight, that Gailey was sort of a good hire: he fielded strong defenses under Tenuta, left talent on hand and had the program at a point where seven wins was unacceptable. What would they give for seven wins this year?
Then they had a “successful” coach who won a little, got raises and extensions and fan support, fried his own fish, and retired after twelve years on his own timing and terms- all while running the program into a deep hole, financially and competitively, from which it shows no signs of recovering.
Strange business.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Good point. At this point, Tech being Chantastic would be a shit ton better than the dreck they have been putting out there the last 3 seasons.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Best thing that the north avenue fucking trade school can pray for, is to revert to the all acc schedule, never having to worry about UGA football beating that nerdfootball ass…GO DAWGS!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hindsight is 20/20 and all, but In retrospect Tech fans looked upon the Gailey years as much more of a disaster than they actually were because of his dismal record against UGA. Which, in turn, made them treat the search for his replacement as a more fraught and desperate enterprise than it needed to be. Certainly not desperate enough to turn to an offensive system only service academies and FCS programs use anymore, but that was the situation they convinced themselves they were in. So they nuked their recruiting for a decade of results that, on the whole, were only marginally better than Gailey’s…and now they’re going to be digging their way out of the triple-option hole for perhaps another five years, perhaps longer.
You hate to see it.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Spot-on correct about UGA- those six straight losses to Georgia were all the tech people could see by 2007…and they gave us a better fight than Auburn or our Sugar Bowl opponent. But 0-6 to Georgia (plus a bad relationship with the boosters) doomed him.
LikeLike
But worse than that, you love to see it.
LikeLike
Johnson was actually a good hire for tech at the time. Everything outside the game changed around him so fast towards the end that he was just out of touch.
But his results over the course of a decade is the best they could ever reasonably hope for.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I would disagree a little there. He had some success in Athens, which was big-time huge for them, and he had some success in a transitional ACC. He was also incredibly up and down during the second half of his tenure and made things like a double-digit home loss to Fair-To-Middlin’ Tennessee State the new normal. During his last four seasons (just looked) he was 24-25.
I think his greatest success was lowering expectations so much that he could occasionally exceed them. And there they remain. It’s a lot easier to take a program to the next level when the next level is mediocrity.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s relative I suppose. He beat UGA, Clemson, FSU, and VT a lot more than he had any right to, or than anyone else is going to at tech.
LikeLiked by 2 people
He did; he had some big wins, and at least three good seasons. Tech has always had those freak wins in them- beating a great Alabama team in 1981; tying Notre Dame in 1980; even Chan humiliated Auburn twice when no one saw it coming. But Johnson got routed-ROUTED- by Duke a surprising number of times, and a few of his bowl games will live on in my heart. The loss to Air Force was a special favorite.
LikeLike
He struck out at QB too often. When he had a good qb, he could cook. When he didn’t, especially those last few years, he got blasted bc he couldn’t steal enough possessions.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And that puzzled me. When he came in, I remember worrying- how hard should it be to find a QB who can run that offense in the state of Georgia? After Nesbitt (Gailey recruit), they were mostly just forgettable.
LikeLike
That would average to 6-6 each of his last 4 seasons. Right now, that would make him a superstar at the Trade School.
LikeLiked by 2 people
And yet I think the three-win seasons they’re currently enjoying are his work almost completely. Just as Les Miles’ LSU teams were built on Saban’s infrastructure.
LikeLike
Fish Fry was:
– Great in 2009
– Great in 2014
– OK in 2016
– Crappy otherwise
LikeLiked by 1 person
You make a good argument that Tech has actually done better hiring than many other schools during that time. Curry, Ross, O’Leary and Johnson and maybe Gailey were good to great hires and they only struck out on Lewis and Coach Catchphrase. Lots of variables go into this but they can get back to the Gailey era if they get a good coach this time, if they don’t then I see them being below Duke for the next 10 years.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I just can’t see Johnson as a good hire when he left the program with its gears totally stripped- and lost six or more (nine in 2015!) more than half of his eleven seasons.
I think a good hire leaves the program better than he found it.
LikeLike
I mean, he lucked into 3 wins vs Georgia. I bet they’d like some of that right now.
But that’s too bad because we’re not coming back to them anytime soon.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Let’s face it. TECH sucks. We’re all just debating on the level of suckage at this point.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Fech sucks whether they are good at football or not.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Now this conversation has turned in a direction more to my liking.
To hell with a bunch of nerds and those pussies they hired as HC’s.
Fuckn losers.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I was just thinking: “I bet they’d chew their arm off for some Chan Gailey seasons now.”
I still want to know what he said in the post-game handshake to Mark Richt after we kicked them in the face in 2002.
LikeLiked by 1 person
OK, so maybe an apology will be necessary for what I am about to say, but wanted to share the news here at GTP:
https://www.thestate.com/sports/college/university-of-south-carolina/usc-football/article263928691.html
Please know I wish the man the absolute best in life as he moves into his post-football future. That said, I will be forever grateful to Rick Sandidge, JR for raising the clucking of the USCe cluckers and giving us a GTP treasure:
Can I hate it for Sandidge, and also wryly smile at the fanbases who put all their hopes and dreams into a single commit?
LikeLiked by 2 people
I used to call South Carolina fans the Cubs fans of college football, but then 2016 happened. I still have to admire their collective cluckiness.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wish people would stop writing about 2020 as if it was anything like a normal season. I get that he acknowledged the lack of cupcakes and including Georgia Tech in that is hilarious. But in conference games only, scoring was significantly higher in 2020. 7 teams gave up over 30 points a game in conference compared to 4 in 2019 and 3 in 2021. 10 teams saw their per game average increase from ’19 to ’20, 6 by 8 or more points. 7 teams saw their scoring averages go back down in 2021, All but 2 by 5 or more points per game. Of those whose scoring averages increased from ’20 to ’21, only 1 was by more than 4 points a game, and 2 were essentially identical to the year before.
Sorry, I just think people should discard any statistics from 2020 to analyze trends, and it bugs me that they don’t.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Also, ’20 UGA had to deal with some significant injuries and a wavering place on the give-a-shit scale given worldwide events.
The most important data point from ’20 is that Bama was laser-focused on the year more so than any other team because Saban is a wizard. But the actual stats? Throw ’em out.
LikeLike
including FCS opponents and Georgia Tech
Hey, Bill, you said “FCS opponents” twice.
LikeLiked by 2 people
At Georgia Tech, you can do that!
LikeLiked by 2 people
“Georgia Tech means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Georgia Tech means always having to say they’re sorry!!
LikeLike
GT sucks. Bad.
LikeLiked by 1 person
’19 UGA’s defense was so, so, so good and unfortunately chained to the James Coley Interregnum.
LikeLike
In my perfect world their bowl eligibility would hinge on our annual meeting. They would enter the game with so much hope only to have us CRUSH their dream every year when they simply crawl under a rock and whimper.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I wholeheartedly endorse this PSA
LikeLike
I like the way you think, Spur21.
LikeLike
LikeLiked by 1 person
SBdiscoKing!!
LikeLike
Tech feels like it hit the perfect storm of shrinking fanbase and interest right at the same time they needed a complete on-field system overhaul while the world around them was full steam ahead on facilities arms and pay race.
I will be shocked if their future resembles anything other than what Tulane is now.
LikeLike
Which honestly, there are worse things in the world. I actually want to go to a Tulane game and make a weekend out of it…. they have a modern little stadium right in the garden district. Not saying that’s North Avenue, just sayin….. 2nd tier football where you can be competitive is not the end of the world.
LikeLike