Georgia Tech Football Postmortem

by Winfield Featherston on Jan 11, 2011 12:15 PM EST in Georgia Tech Football

As the BCS National Championship closed out the 2010 football season closed last night (Good Night Moon), I felt a tinge of sadness as my favorite sport came to a sudden end. 2009 was a long, drawn out season. It contained a road-trip month of death in October and I guess when you win almost all the time, it adds to the enjoyment. 2010 was exactly the opposite. If Georgia Tech was ever a blip on the screen this past year it was for all the wrong reasons: reigning ACC Champions losing to Kansas, getting blown out to Miami, and barely beating Wake Forest. If anything, the season was so incredibly miserable from a standards point of view that no one from the outside Georgia Tech Football world will remember it.

Rough season or not, memories still remain.Two main memories will stick in my mind for a long time:

1. Sweeping the regular season

I was a freshman in 2005 and my first game was the road game against Auburn. In 2006, I missed 1 game. In 2007 I missed 1 game. In 2008 I missed 2 games, in 2009 1 game. When would it end? My first alumni season, when the Jackets went 6-6. Call it a personal goal of mine, but mission accomplished.

2. Joshua Nesbit: The Player, The Warrior, And The Way He Went Out

In the game that was arguably our best game played this year, in Blacksburg, VA, we saw Joshua Nesbitt, our warrior, run his last play every in a Yellow Jacket uniform. It wasn't the way he was supposed to go out. He was supposed to will us to a victory, and make grown men cry at his sheer willpower to carry the team and the fanbase on his back. Instead, he bowed out in the same way the season ended: completely unexpected.

3. A Losing Record

The most disappointment part of the 2010 season was the Yellow Jackets reaching a level that we never stooped to under Chan Gailey. The last time Georgia Tech had a losing record was in 1996 under George O'Learly when he was cleaning up the mess that B*** L**** left behind. It's even more frustrating to see the losing come from our God-send of a football coach. The improvements are large and looming but the responsibilities lie on our side. They are fixable.

This season, this god-awful forgotten season, will be passed by others, far worse and surely far better. But memories and thoughts may still remain. What are some of your top memories of 2010 Georgia Tech football?

233 days until football season...

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The season is a blur

and unfortunately the few vivid memories I have are really awful -like a certain missed extra point which looked bad even before the toe hit the leather.

by Atlanta's original team on Jan 11, 2011 1:33 PM EST reply actions

That PAT didn’t cost us the game. If he had made it, UGA would’ve kicked a FG instead of not making that 4th and short, which would have put us in essentially the same situation (except down 3 instead of 1).

by a5ehren on Jan 12, 2011 12:44 AM EST up reply actions

We can argue about whether it would have made a difference

like would it have picked up Tech emotionally, would it have put more pressure on Georgia etc.

BUT THAT WAS NOT MY POINT The image is so vivid for me because it epitomized a season in which even our best players were horribly inconsistent and if anything could go wrong it did go wrong.

by Atlanta's original team on Jan 12, 2011 9:15 AM EST up reply actions

What makes the season fustrating to me...

…is that I know the team was capable of being better than 6-7. With the way they played, 6-7 is almost an overachievement, but this team had the talent to do no worst than 8-5.

Blair’s missed PAT will be remembered, but on the list of things-that-went-wrong, it’s near the bottom.

by Dive Keep and Pitch on Jan 11, 2011 2:33 PM EST reply actions

I share the frustration

I too have said repeatedly in other places that this team should have been better. Now I am stuck with having to figure out if maybe these guys were as bad as they played.

But the question was about what images stand out for you. I also thought of the horror I felt when I realized Nesbit was going to pass down on VA Tech’s goal line followed shortly after with realizing his arm was broken.

by Atlanta's original team on Jan 12, 2011 9:20 AM EST up reply actions

What's even worse than all of this...

Is that the horrible football season left us staring dead into the abyss of a basketball program. Feb 18th can’t come soon enough and please for all that is sacred in sports do NOT let any of either sport carry over into baseball. I’m not sure I can take that level of suck.

"You could spend the next fifteen seconds of your life watching a man and a tiger scream together, or you could be an idiot."
Fact.

by Jesse28 on Jan 11, 2011 2:39 PM EST reply actions

Please pardon my ignorance.

What happens on Feb 18?

by Dive Keep and Pitch on Jan 11, 2011 4:36 PM EST up reply actions

GT Baseball

Ramblin', Gamblin', HELL OF AN ENGINEER!

by JBar on Jan 11, 2011 4:37 PM EST up reply actions

Turnovers, dropped passes...

…untimely penalties (especially false starts), and awful special teams play define this season for me. This is totally subjective, but this has been a season in which the team showed a lack of heart. Do you know what I mean? This is also the first season since Bill Lewis, probably, in which we didn’t win a game we weren’t “supposed” to win.

I get to look forward to another offseason of defending Paul Johnson and his system to my skeptical friends and family, only this is much worse because what do we have to show for it? A well-meaning UGA fan friend condescendingly told me that “if only” we had a passing game, we could have beaten UGA. I said, “What are you talking about? Georgia couldn’t do anything to stop us, defensively. We dominated the line of scrimmage. We could only stop ourselves through turnovers.”

He replied, “Yes, but I just think if you could have passed the ball…” When will this conversation ever end? Not after a season like this. Ugh!

I believe CPJ will fix these problems. But I didn’t like in his press conference last week when he said he knew “before the beginning of the season” that there were these big problems. He certainly wasn’t talking about “rebuilding” this year. Why was there so little improvement?

by Brent L. White on Jan 11, 2011 4:38 PM EST reply actions

We are not a come from behind

with little time on the clock team. We were in that situation often in ’10.

Without a “2 minute offense” to dink and dunk down the field with a lot of out of bounds and Tight End drags across the LOS, we have trouble making up points quickly.

With QBJN and BBJD we did have a quick strike running game (vs FSU in 2009), but that was not in our DNA now.

Lack of leadership is crucial. Jeff Mongen at GSU says the Spread Option takes players who believe that no one can beat them to make the system click.

by DressHerInWhiteAndGold on Jan 12, 2011 11:58 AM EST via mobile reply actions

2 minute offense

Are there any statistics that show just how often a “2 minute offense” works (i.e. score the minimum required points)? I’ve alway thought that if a 2 minute offense was really such a great thing, then teams should be using them from the first minute of the game, not waiting until they’ve nearly lost the game. I see a 2 minute offense as basically being about two steps removed from a Hail Mary pass.

by Dive Keep and Pitch on Jan 12, 2011 2:45 PM EST up reply actions

Not sure

But it sure worked for Oregon. They essentially run a 2-minute offense the entire game and they averaged 47 pts/g (1st), 530.7 yds/g (1st), and 6.7 ypp (T-11th). I could be mistaken on this one because I can’t seem to find it anywhere, but I remember during the championship game they stated that Oregon’s average drive time on scoring drives was something ridiculous like 1:47. Their average TOP was a little over 27 minutes a game. That’s highly efficient to score that much in so little time.

"You could spend the next fifteen seconds of your life watching a man and a tiger scream together, or you could be an idiot."
Fact.

by Jesse28 on Jan 13, 2011 1:57 PM EST up reply actions

Redzone Turnovers

…all of them. Just eats me up inside.

by acedarney on Jan 12, 2011 12:12 PM EST reply actions

Lingering in the background

I must say that as I look into the abyss of GT basketball currently and the great flame of Hewitt’s career that burned brightly at first and has faded so drastically, I begin to wonder if CPJ could be the same situation. I don’t think so as I sit here now, but I wouldn’t have said the same thing about Hewitt in 2005 either (year after so much success).

Those lingering criticisms of the “sylized” offense not being able to attract top talent, or being figured out by teams with more resources at the higher level will continue to stay around after a season like last year.

by cltgtf on Jan 14, 2011 11:20 AM EST reply actions