For fans of both teams, it was more of the same as two mistake-prone squads met. Georgia Tech’s quarterback struggled, but the Hokies didn’t make him pay for most of his mistakes. Meanwhile, the Jackets showed their knack for attacking the ball, while the Hokies added piles of unforced errors, reminding us of Grant Wells’ turnover problems and Keshawn King’s issues with hanging on to the ball.
The Yellow Jacket offensive line was mostly ineffective, though at the end, Tech’s defense was too winded to close things out in the fourth quarter. The Hokies picked on the defensive linemen in coverage, while the Jackets worked to get receivers isolated on Dax Hollifield. And there were false starts and Da’Wain Lofton being at the center of some rough plays for the Hokies, and horrendous punts for the Jackets. The Jackets won another game their fans will remember fondly for years, while the Hokies again dug deeper into their hole, and this time they might’ve missed their best chance to hit bottom.
And for all that, the game was close, and often thanks to surprising plays by both teams. Not to twist the knife, but check out these Pro Football Focus grades:
The Hokies came out ahead in seven of ten individual categories, and most of the time by sizable margins.
The Videos
Unfortunately, I realized too late this was an RSN broadcast from Bally Sports, so I had to pirate my game stream, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to download it while I watched; I’m guessing Bally not being an ESPN/Disney company is also why we don’t have a lot of video publicly available, e.g., a condensed game or more detailed player highlights. (Note: someone posted on YouTube a full-game cut right before my deadline, but I didn’t have time to do more than glance at it.) That makes this article more of an uncurated highlight review than I’d like. I don’t follow media rights stuff, so just in case this is an RSN issue that works out the same way next week, I’ll see if I can get a decent downloadable stream so I can at least review and edit the raw broadcast.
The Hokies got their first score on a variation of their favorite play, Split Zone:
