Mailbag 6/22

jabsterjacket: Do you feel by the end of September we will know if Key has made enough change to have stepped significantly in a positive direction? What is Your pass/fail for Key for that month? I keep hearing people say that Bowling Green is a gimme. Do you believe this or or are you uneasy about the game like I am?

Logan: Looking at September we have 2 “gimme” games in SCST and Bowling Green (to answer your question about Bowling Green, I’m worried about them too but I still think that should be considered a gimme game for an ACC team), a middle ground game with Louisville (although that is debatable), a difficult road game in Wake Forest, and what is most likely a loss in a road game against Ole Miss.

A decent coach should win the games they’re expected win (i.e. don’t lose to Citadel), so walking out of September with a 2-3 record would not leave me happy but would at least meet my expectations of a new coach building up a program. I tend to base my evaluations of a good coach based on how he does in the middle ground games, so if we walk out of September 3-2 and were at least competitive against Ole Miss and Wake Forest I will be more inclined to buy into Coach Key. Worse or better than those records, you can make an educated guess at where my opinion will land. I’m not gonna say I will know everything after September, but that month will set the tone. October will be where we really get a feel for what direction the program is heading in with Key at the helm.

Ben: I don’t know that I’m ready to call any game a “gimme,” but I think looking at those games against SCST and Bowling Green, we will know very quickly if something is going horribly wrong. Personally—like Logan—I am more interested in seeing how we do against Wake and Ole Miss. If those are both blowouts, yeah, Tech probably won’t be super competitive this year. But if Tech has some fight in those games, we could be in for a fun (at least more fun than the last few years) season.

DressHerInWhiteAndGold: With Lionel Messi coming to Miami, is futbol finally ready for prime time in the US?

Counter: if Pele and Brandy Chastain couldn’t do it....

Counter: soccer moms and progeny have moved on to lacrosse and futbol is so 15 minutes ago and only good every 4 years....

Jack: Brandi Chastain DID DO IT! Her team is still constantly talked about in the lore of the USWNT, the US national team with possibly the greatest sustained success at the global stage from 1999-present. You do not get Abby Wambach or Megan Rapinoe without Chastain and Hamm, simple as that. The number of girls (family of mine included) playing soccer and drawing inspiration from the national team’s best is countless. It may not show itself on ESPN, but it’s showing up in your neighborhood and on your school teams around you. At least in Atlanta, soccer is now and always has been the youth sport of the city.

To your more general answer: absolutely, MLS has been slowly and surely gaining steam to get a player like this to actually consider and then show up to America. No, we’re not the best league in the world, and probably will never be, but American soccer is not some afterthought to be cast aside. The US is soccer’s next revolutionary frontier, and more people are waking up to that realization.

Logan: I think it is fair to say that soccer is a big time sport in quite a few US cities. I can’t speak for every team, but it seems like I see sell out stadiums pretty frequently and the MLS gets coverage on most major networks. I think you could make an argument that MLS is on its way to being more popular than the MLB in the states. The key thing the other major sports have going for them is history in the US, but as the generations start shifting I think more and more people are trending towards soccer as a primary sport.

Submitted via email: Hey guys,

Hope your week is going well. Currently my fiancé is into 30 for 30 style sport documentaries, which is cool because so am I. My question for you this week, if you could have a documentary about a period in sports at Tech which one would it be about?

CPJ’s period as head coach, the 1990 football championship season, the womenswear volleyball run recently, Our falling out with the SEC, John Heisman’s antics… we got plenty of sports history to talk about but what topic would you pick to make a documentary of if you were given the budget?

Let me know. Y’all have a good one,

Signed

Pantsless Joe

Ben: I would really enjoy a sports documentary about the Bobby Dodd era of college football. There’s a lot of history there, so I feel like there would be a lot to work with. I would also make one recommendation: Jake Grant needs to be involved.

Logan: Do we have a documentary about Heisman? I’m not aware of one but that could be fun. I also wouldn’t mind one of those “based on a true story” style doc shows like the “Winning Time” for the Lakers about Heisman. That guy did some things which were both ridiculous and petty. I think it could be a low key Blue Mountain State style show if played correctly, although that might mess with the accuracy a bit.