For a second consecutive week, Georgia Tech had a pair of players honored for an outstanding game — it was defensive back Lance Austin and linebacker Brant Mitchell this time around. Lance Austin, whose twin brother Lawrence won the same ACC Defensive Back of the Week award for his performance against Virginia Tech last week, had a 24-yard pick six and three pass deflections on the day. Mitchell, meanwhile, contributed a career-high 12 tackles and got his own interception of Cavalier quarterback Matt Johns during the later stages of the game. The Tech defense didn’t quite stop Virginia’s offense as effectively as we’d hoped, and there’s a good chance that the outcome could have been quite different if not for the key plays made by both Mitchell and Austin. Congratulations to them on a pair of exceptional games.
Check out a couple of those big plays in the highlight reel below. It’s pretty amazing that the Jackets were badly out-gained by UVA yet still managed to ride timely turnovers to what looks like a pretty easy victory... at least on the surface.
Tackling was clearly a struggle for UVA on both offense and defense — take a look at what Qua Searcy did to those poor defenders and then what Lance Austin did the the offense on his pick-six. Some say that the ankles of those Virginia players remain buried in the ground at Bobby Dodd Stadium to this day.
Georgia Tech head basketball coach Josh Pastner is hoping that dialing up the tempo a bit will help his team take advantage of what opposing defenses are willing to give them, something that really didn’t happen during Tech’s loss to Ohio last week. Quotes from the article indicate that Pastner’s vision for the team is clearly much different than that of former coach Brian Gregory, likely for the better.
He’s certainly not wrong, but the first part of the thought makes me wonder what he saw in the team that he felt would allow them to succeed as three-point shooters. What they really need to do, especially during the non-ACC portion of the schedule, is to take advantage of the physical mismatches that will be presented when facing teams like Sam Houston State that have only one player over 6-foot-7 on roster. That length advantage is severely underrated in basketball.
It’s now time for the Hate Week cringe of the day, brought to you by some poor soul who thought he had an A+ idea to get the team hyped up a few years back.
Were you wondering why Mark Richt was fired? Because that is why Mark Richt was fired. He willingly danced and lip-synced alongside some random guy to a song called “Dawg Bites” and then allowed it to be posed online, where over 144,000 people have viewed it to date. His fate was deserved.