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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > August > 02
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Johnson will be successful at Tech
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Paul Johnson smiled as he spoke, but only once or twice and not for long. Regarding his stylized offense and the incessant questioning thereof, he said, “It’s past the point of being anything other than amusing.”
Johnson has been a head coach for 11 seasons. He has been running the same offense — the Georgia Tech press guide calls it an “option-based spread” — even longer. He has won 73.3 percent of his games using the thing, so what do you expect him to say? That his offense doesn’t and won’t function when every shred of statistical evidence suggests it can and does?
“As soon as we lose a game,” Johnson said Saturday, speaking at Tech’s media day, “[the offense] is going to be [seen as] the reason we lost.”
Then: “If you don’t execute and you put the ball on the ground, it doesn’t work. But you can look back on last year [when Tech played under Chan Gailey, who was fired] and say the pro-style offense doesn’t work, either.”
Yes, Johnson is more than a bit sensitive. You’d be, too. You create an offense and win big with it at two places where winning is more a function of creative coaching than of five-star recruits, and still there are those who insist his system will go broke in the ACC.
Johnson: “What division are we in, the NFC East? At the Naval Academy we played Maryland and Wake Forest and Duke and Rutgers and Notre Dame and Boston College and Pitt — it’s not like those schools are in some different division than we are. Duke has lost a lot of games using a pro-style offense, so does that mean it doesn’t work — or that it just didn’t work at Duke? Virginia Tech won our league using the same offense we run.”
For all the peripheral talk of limitations and liabilities, the proper focus at Tech should be on opportunity. The ACC is in such flux that Wake Forest now seems a sounder program than Miami or Florida State, and that’s an indication of what one splendid coach can do. Johnson is a splendid coach who has access to resources foreign to him at Georgia Southern and Navy. Here he’ll have both big linemen and speed. Here he’ll be able to run his stylized offense at an even higher level.
“People say [the opponents] will have too much speed,” Johnson said. “We ran this offense for six years at the Naval Academy, and I can promise you our kids here are faster than those were.”
For all the success enjoyed by West Virginia and Virginia Tech and other converts to the spread option, nobody knows more about its workings than Johnson. He invented it 24 years ago when working as an offensive coordinator under Erk Russell at Georgia Southern, and those Eagles won two Division I-AA championships. (Upon returning to GSU as head coach in the ’90s, Johnson would win two more.)
“I’ve never had much skepticism,” said Johnson, speaking of his offense. “If I had, I wouldn’t do it.”
It will take a while for Tech fans to grow accustomed to the new look, but that’s part of the system’s beauty. It’s exponentially harder for an opponent to prepare for the exotic. (Ask Georgia about Troy, which gained 145 more yards against the Bulldogs last year than Florida and Tim Tebow had the week before.)
“In my mind, it’s been proved that this offense will work,” said Johnson, and not just in his mind but, over the past quarter-century, on various fields of play. Soon enough, it will work at Tech. It will work because Paul Johnson will make it work.
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