Dear Todd- Take Your Time For Ol' Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech has an opening for a new head football coach, as of last week when Paul Johnson announced he was stepping down after leading the program for 11 years. There’s been much conjecture about a possible replacement. The job is attractive enough to gain widespread interest but possibly daunting enough to give pause to some prospective candidates.

Given that, I see two angles on Tech’s situation. First, the bad news-Tech fans are going to miss Paul Johnson’s work more than they may think. But there is also good news: the long term prospects for the program are bright.

There are two sayings pertaining to college football that address different philosophies regarding successful coaching. “He can take his’n and beat your’n, and then take your’n and beat his’n” is a paean to superior coaching, spoken by Bum Phillips about Bear Bryant. The second saying, author unknown, speaks instead to the primary importance of strong recruiting in college football–“it’s not the x’s and the o’s, its the Jimmy’s and the Joe’s. Paul Johnson’s steadfast belief in the productivity of his favored offense is an endorsement of the notion that a system or scheme can prevail over superior raw talent. He has an inherent belief that he can win with his’n or with your’n. This belief helps explain his disdain for recruiting rankings. And his coaching record supports that belief. However, most of the college football world ascribes to the other position, that winning is mostly about accumulating the deepest roster, and that good coaches will change schemes to optimize the skills of the players they have on that roster– making the scheme a lesser consideration per se.

Tech is one of those jobs where the expectations are a bit lofty relative to the assets at hand. For that, Paul Johnson gets some of the credit (or blame). Johnson’s system has been a very good fit for the Georgia Institute of Technology. This is a school with a long, proud football history. But true glory had been missing for a while before Johnson took over in 2008. Yes, there was a national title back in 1990 (UPI) under Bobby Ross. But during the tenure of Johnson’s predecessor Chan Gailey, the Yellow Jackets had performed only a sliver above plain average and had not beaten their arch-rival Georgia. Johnson’s 11 years at Tech yielded an 82-59 record , 3 ACC coach of the year awards with 2 Orange Bowl appearances and 3 wins over Georgia. Johnson’s career-long success means Georgia Tech has had instant respect from all opponents, because of his offense. The offense enabled them to pose a potential threat to anyone they played. Thus the Jimmy’s and Joe’s become relatively less important, since Johnson’s system can verifiably produce wins with lesser-ranked recruits.

Why does this help Georgia Tech? Well, flatly put, this place ain’t for everybody. The academic demands at Tech are significant. The curriculum is relatively narrow, meaning a young man who hopes to make football his profession will still need to give real attention and sustained effort to his schoolwork, or risk eligibility issues. If you are a highly-ranked high schooler, say a 5-star defensive lineman for example, a stint at Georgia Tech may seem to be a circuitous route to your anticipated NFL career.

And then there are the Tech facilities. The downtown stadium is historically intriguing but not beautiful. It is also not overly large, yet rarely completely full. All of these factors limit the size of the pool of recruits who will aspire to play for Tech AND who can succeed in school.

For the past 11 years, Tech fans knew what to expect. Paul Johnson’s approach to winning games was to rely on having his offense perform at high efficiency and productivity. When his option was clicking, Tech could control the ball, and thereby also control the clock. The offense would grind away, securing fairly reliable gains on the ground. Frequently there would be an attempt to convert short yardage 4th down plays. The roles of passing and punting and even kicking field goals were thus proportionately decreased. Johnson was like a shadetree mechanic, carefully fine-tuning his prized engine with attention to details that many others did not see. His conviction was that his well-tuned high-performance engine could render many other aspects of the car’s overall performance-suspension, mirrors, tires and the like–relatively less important.

At its peak, Tech’s offense would finish long possessions with touchdowns, thereby extending leads while diminishing available time for the opponent to counter. A prime example in 2018 was the victory over Virginia Tech. In this road win, with his back-up QB at the helm, Johnson’s offense earned 35 first downs, but had no single play that went over 16 yards. They ran tbe ball 78 times for 465 yards, had no turnovers and held the ball for over 42 minutes in a 49-28 win. (For a more extreme example, consider that Johnson’s 2004 Navy team had a drive against New Mexico that included 26 plays covering 94 yards, using an incredible 14 minutes and 26 seconds–and ending in a field goal.)

With an offense like that, defense and special teams take on less importance. And though some Tech fans believe the Jackets should simply place more emphasis on those areas , Johnson will point out that he tried. He has had four different Defensive Coordinators in his 11 years at Tech. He has likewise shored up and reconfigured his special teams staff. Despite these efforts, the defense and special teams have not often been relative strengths. Detractors say that’s because highly-rated defensive recruits will spurn a system that faces an option offense each day in practice, with its emphasis on cut-blocking and assignment football. Johnson says he hears similar criticism regarding his offensive personnel, yet year after year, his offense is among the national team rushing leaders (as they were again this year). And, as we’ve all heard, the best defense IS a good offense.

At the same time , this offense is hard-pressed to create a come-from-behind win. The passing game is effective primarily when totally unexpected, catching the defense off-guard. In any comeback scenario, passing is of course a potentially quicker way to move the ball, But the passing skills of a quarterback who is “option-trained” are not typically as sharp as a traditional drop-back passer. Nor are the pass-protection skills of the offensive line. So when Tech “has to pass”, things can get ugly. Those factors, among others, prompt many to push for a new coach with a more traditional offense. They believe that more good recruits will be available to a Georgia Tech squad that features schemes more in line with the dreams of the 4-stars and 5-stars who have been looking elsewhere.

Of course, the world of college football has changed much since Johnson’s first year at Tech in 2008. There seems to be a concentration of truly elite teams in the young era of the College Football Playoff. (Two of them, Clemson and Georgia, bookend Tech’s regular season schedule in 2019). And right here in the state of Georgia, there are nascent competitors for talent. Both Georgia State and Kennesaw State have launched their own programs in recent years and each is in growth mode.

So why is the future bright for Tech? Because even with all those considerations, Tech has some significant advantages. It’s a school with a great reputation, sitting in the middle of fertile recruiting ground. There’s a strong history. Sure, their last national championship was in 1990. But that’s more recent than Notre Dame, Penn State, Georgia, and over 100 other Division 1 schools.

More important, Georgia Tech now has an AD who played college football– at Georgia Tech no less- and who has the energy and vision to make a clear-eyed push to advance the Institute’s football fortunes. Todd Stansbury brings a pragmatic approach to his task, saying he wants to find the very best candidate to help Tech win games. Period. That means the group to be considered is broad. Present-day head coaches, former head coaches, coordinators, NFL types, coach/ disciples of the option offense, coaches who detest the option-they are all open for consideration, as they should be. The line between success and failure in college football games is often razor-thin. The same is true of hiring decisions. An approach like Stansbury’s provides the best chance for success.

Note that there is much pressure to hurry. There is recruiting to do and there are season ticket sales to push. There are people carefully counting the days since Johnson stepped down.But this decision will have long-ranging effects, and thus some careful deliberation is prudent. Avoiding the hasty hire is step one toward hiring well.

After all , Tech already has a coach in place for their very next game. After December 26, there’s a break. For AD Stansbury, this process and this decision call for strict assignment football from him. The former linebacker is certainly up to the task. Do your homework, make your reads. And when the needed research is done and the time is right, pull the trigger. You know, like a ramblin’ gamblin’ hell of an engineer.

Patrick Conarro