Technical Tidbits 6/12: JaQuez Jackson withdraws commitment from Tech

Georgia Tech fans have regarded everything football-related as holy for years now, but former punter Grant Aasen is taking the sentiment one step further by forgoing his final season of collegiate eligibility to enroll in seminary school. Aasen’s story has received plenty of coverage since he finalized his decision a couple of months back, but the above article from the Washington Post has some interesting details about Aasen’s life-threatening injury in high school that other sources have neglected to mention. It sounds like Paul Johnson tried to convince Aasen to stick around for his final season of football on the Flats but that the former walk-on was already set on pursuing his new career path. Congratulations and best of luck to Grant!

Georgia Tech’s football program received some strange news yesterday morning when three-star linebacker JaQuez Jackson announced that he had decommitted from Tech just over a week after announcing his intentions to attend. A well-regarded prospect out of Fort Valley, GA, Jackson announced his latest decision via Twitter but insisted that Tech is still a frontrunner for his services. I suppose that could be true, at least in his mind, but Paul Johnson tends to be less forgiving in situations like this one. We know Johnson to be a no-nonsense coach with little tolerance for shenanigans, and decommitting so quickly from a school is about as shenanigans-ish as you can get without being a certain person whose last name rhymes with Shotry.

The ACC forged college football’s champion last season, but the success of 2017 will be difficult to replicate this time around given how many key coaching changes have gone down around the conference. Georgia Tech got off relatively easy, losing only B-Backs and quarterbacks coach Bryan Cook to Georgia Southern, but a few other schools didn’t fare so well. Perhaps the biggest loss of all was Pitt offensive coordinator Matt Canada, who left for the same job with Ed Orgeron at LSU; his offense gave Tech fits last season. Outside of that, a successful season for Wake Forest meant that the Deacon staff was ripe for poaching and UNC took a big hit with the retirement of defensive coordinator Gene Chizik. The latter is great news for Tech, especially given how tough Chizik’s defenses played Tech over the past two seasons.