Georgia Tech Football: Ole Miss – Advanced Stats Review – Offense

I don’t care how many points Ole Miss was favored by. I don’t care how few months it’s been since this offensive coaching staff has been retooled. I don’t care about recruiting rankings. I simply don’t have any patience for any of it.

In year four of a head coach, this offensive performance is 100% unacceptable — full stop.

I’m not going to sit here and write 1000 words about how, despite the score, there were nuggets of progress. There were none. This was putrid. This has been putrid. Here are the scores of Georgia Tech’s last four games versus FBS opponents:

• Ole Miss 42, Georgia Tech 0
• Clemson 41, Georgia Tech 10
• Athens 45, Georgia Tech 0
• Georgia Tech 0, Notre Dame 55

The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets college football team has scored ten (count them — TEN) points versus FBS opponents in their last four contests under its current head coach. Said head coach, who was brought in with a high pedigree as an SEC defensive coordinator, has managed a defense that allowed a combined 183 points in those contests.

I’m not going to provide stats more advanced than that. The book on this writes itself. Enough is enough. You do not (or at least, you shouldn’t) lose by 40-plus points multiple times in consecutive years and keep your job.

Here are a few counterarguments for those who read this and feel I’m being too harsh, being disrespectful to the players on the roster, or putting the program in a bad light at a critical recruiting period:

• I feel pretty confident in saying that the vast majority of the Georgia Tech fanbase is as fed up with our current coaching situation as I am.
• I’m not saying anything new OR false:

• I empathize with the players on the team. I feel bad for them. This group ranks fifth in the ACC in the 247 recruiting composite (including transfers). They’re a team being hard done by a coach that has failed to develop those that need it and properly deploy them on the field. It’s unacceptable.
• Recruits are recruits. Tech has generally averaged around the same level of recruiting before and with their current head coach. They will be fine.

“Maybe he’s overreacting,” you might think. “It’s hard to get a program rebuild going and the staff just needs more time to really work out the problems of that the previous regime left.”

It’s year four. There is no more time to give. This is entirely the current head coach’s roster. There is no more blaming the previous coach and there never should have been to begin with. The rebuild was a false narrative that many of us (myself included!) bought into — there was no smoldering crater to rebuild and reshape like we were led to believe.

The last guy left a few cupboards bare. The new guy gutted half the house, put in drywall spackled with fools’ gold, hung a couple gaudy posters, and said the last guy left him no foundation to work with. I can name at least three head coaches hired within the past few years at programs long-considered bottom-feeders that have turned it around (or are at least headed in the right direction) in 2022. This program has been stuck in neutral since 2019. There have been no signs of consistent and sustainable progress — none. If anything, the team has gone backwards: at times, it seems to lack fundamentals, discipline, and care for the details. For all of those intangible qualities of a football team (and all of the tangible ones too!), the buck stops with the guy wearing the head coach’s headset.

I’m fully aware that there’s a bunch of constraints with this program — I and others have spilled and will continue to spill gallons of digital ink writing about them on this fine blog. That doesn’t mean we, or anyone associated with this institution, should find this kind of coaching performance acceptable from the highest-paid and most public of public employees associated with the Georgia Institute of Technology.

It’s time. Make the call.