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Saturday, August 16, 2008
Tech looks to its future with patience
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The campus was a-bustle, moms and pops delivering their freshpersons (my word) into the care of Georgia Tech. The stretch of Techwood Drive behind the east stands of Bobby Dodd Stadium had been reduced to a one-way street. It was a clutter of cars jockeying for position, their cargo being unloaded under the guarded attention of campus police, and rug merchants who had set up shop on the busy corner. Growling buses wallowed along through this scene, and strangely enough, no conflicts flared up and no hostile voices rang out. Along Fraternity Row upperclassman were sweeping out, tidying up and fumigating, making their residences palatable for the “rush” season.
I’d clambered through such a scene before myself, when I delivered my own freshman child to the campus. No hugging, no tears, no last-minute counsel. He opened the car door, said a cool goodbye and was gone before I could assemble my platitudes. He knew why he was there, where he was headed, and besides, he was going to be only five miles from home. It’s not the miles that count, to many such youth, I’d say, it would be the first eye-opening day for the rest of their lives.
One parent going through the stage of ” moving on” sat in the office of athletics dirtector. Chris Radakovich was already safely ensconced in a dormitory “just a 9-iron away,” as his father put it. The transition had been quite painless for Dan Radakovich. Chris would be no home body. Campus life for him, and he was already settled in. Chris was the first Radakovich out of the nest, and Ol’ Dad was cool, talking it all in stride. Besides, there were other campus matters that bore more heavily upon him, such as the installation of a new football coach, which brought with it pressure of another nature.
Georgia Tech has been subsisting restlessly on a diet of 7-win seasons and second-level bowl games for five of the past six seasons. During that time the football team had never been able to beat Georgia, seven times in a row the loser. This is searing on the mind of the West Stand populace. Oh, feast on a few big-time headline-fetchers. Beat Auburn, beat Clemson, beat Miami, pound Notre Dame now and then, but no steady diet of classic play. At one home game last season, attendance dipped below 20,000.
The call went out and Paul Johnson was reeled in. Johnson is an astonishing story. Never played a down of college football. Grew up in a small mountain town. Decided his life was football, and went to work building a proper foundation. A winner wherever he has coached; one season, winner of the Dodd Coach of the Year Award, now coaching in the shoes of the man himself. Calm, unpretentious, rarely ever raises his voice, in so many ways, the antithesis of the boom-voiced, boss kind of coach. Wherever he has held the reins, the offense has been the same, a spread option in which the quarterback handles the ball, but rarely passes it. We’re all waiting with passionate curiosity.
On this day, near the end of open practices some of the parents dropped in from delivering their offspring to have a look. “One magazine rated us 86th,” said a father from Baltimore. Not just an occasional patron, either. He buys season tickets and makes the scene for several home games. “I’ve seen Johnson’s teams at Navy, and I think there are good days ahead here,” he said.
Another father, who had played in Bill Curry’s seasons of depression, had dropped by to see his freshman safety at work. Tall, swift, impressively athletic, ol’ dad was rather tense about it all. The scene of a Johnson practice is impressively orderly, each segment like the moving part of a smoothly operating machine. Predictions don’t make a season, can’t dismay alums thirsting for a return to glory, and so it goes, that Georgia Tech looks to its future with calm and patient expectations.
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