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Sunday, September 4, 2005
A truly elite team mustn’t backslide
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Here’s what needs to happen: Georgia Tech needs to handle North Carolina and Connecticut the way a Top 25 team should handle North Carolina and Connecticut, thereby making the Jackets 3-0 when they play Virginia Tech on Sept. 24, thereby ratcheting up the stakes on the entire season.
Here’s what can’t happen: Georgia Tech can’t follow what seems another in a series of breakthrough upsets with another in a series of backsliding losses.
It isn’t that Tech hasn’t won big games under Chan Gailey. Fact is, it wins one every year. It beat North Carolina State, then unbeaten and ranked No. 10, in 2002 but lost the next week at home to a Florida State team that would finish 9-5. The Jackets beat No. 17 Auburn in 2003 and led wobbly Florida State 13-0 the next week in Tallahassee, only to lose 14-13. Last year Tech stole a game against No. 20 Clemson but lost by three touchdowns one week later against North Carolina, which was coming off a 32-point loss to Virginia.
And here the Jackets are again. They whipped Auburn at Auburn to give the Institute its most rousing opening victory since Bill Curry and John Dewberry beat Alabama and the sourball Ray Perkins on Sept. 15, 1984. With one week gone, Tech has given itself a chance to have its best year under Gailey. Trouble is, Tech has given itself a similar chance before and wasted it every time.
A month ago, Gailey was asked if the repeated failure to consolidate gains troubled him. “Sure it does,” he said. “But we’ll have that chance again.” Sure enough, the Jackets have it now.
The memory of that thudding loss in Chapel Hill so soon after that astonishing victory in Death Valley came wafting back in the early-morning hours after Tech completed its wholly deserved victory at Jordan-Hare. The Jackets played with the poise and purpose necessary to win in such a frightful setting. They got ahead and nursed their lead. They put the burden of proof on Brandon Cox, Auburn’s new quarterback, and he came undone â€â€? turnovers the last five possessions â€â€? beneath the load.
Reggie Ball completed eight passes in the first quarter and only nine thereafter, but this was the sort of game in which it was essential to be precise early. (You might consult Boise State for a contrasting point of view.) Tech was the better team and Ball the better quarterback and Gailey the better coach on the night, and that’s how you win on the road against an opponent that hadn’t lost in 22 months. You outplay the other guys, and you also outsmart them.
What transpired Saturday was no fluke, but a loss in either of these next two games will make it seem like one. That has been the Gailey pattern: One step forward, one step back. His team finishes above .500 but not far enough above .500 to grace the Top 25. The Jackets figure to enter the AP poll this week for the first time under this coach, and they’re talented enough to stay there all season provided they tend to business and beat the teams they should.
The daunting schedule looks less imposing today. One of those four difficult road games has already been won, and if you can compete at Auburn you shouldn’t be awed by the environs at Virginia Tech and Miami and Virginia. Will the Jackets win all of those games? No, but if they could grab just one they’d position themselves to be where athletics director Dave Braine said they ought to be when Georgia comes to Bobby Dodd Stadium on Nov. 26: Ensconced within the Top 25, just like the hated Bulldogs.
You stay in the rankings only by going from strength to strength, and failing to do that has been the abiding weakness of Gailey’s program. That could be about to change. These Jackets seem capable of stringing something together. But we’ve all said the same before, and we’ve been wrong every time. These Jackets need to be the ones to prove us right.
Permalink | Comments (33) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
A little pleasure before business
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Athens â€â€? The foliage hadn’t yet begun the turn to autumn. The heat index was mid-July. Anybody who wasn’t sweating wasn’t breathing. But in Sanford Stadium on Saturday night, the Georgia Bulldogs set the thermostat of their 90,000-or-so woofing patrons at midseason level.
“David who?” the Sunday headline screamed, in tribute to D.J. Shockley, the quarterback-in-waiting who had spent three seasons patiently waiting his turn behind David Greene. Woooo, pretty strong stuff. This against a team from the Rockies that had never played before such a heathen (to them) enemy, had to deal with speed unaccustomed in their Western world, laboring under the load of an 18th ranking in the nation. Boise State folded like a cheap beach chair. Boise will be Boise, the saying goes, and in this case they were.
But not to dismiss the departed David Greene with such flippancy. This was just the first of 11 games, and true, the senior Shockley was better than advertised. He still had his priorities in order. “This was my first big win,” he said, but later added, “my degree is larger to me than football.”
Above all else, he is a dedicated student and citizen to be proud of.
I’ll have to admit my first inclination was to take as wild a fling as the headline, when I suggested to Mark Richt, “Have we another Michael Vick here?” The coach simply smiled. “It surprised me that he played that well,” he said. “I could never have predicted what happened.”
It was an afterthought, but now that you look back upon it, there was no way the Boise State Broncos could have expected to come into such a scene of pandemonium, overwhelming scorn cascading down upon them, and play within seven points of Georgia, as the oracles projected. The humiliation had to run deep. Well, at least they got $650,000 for their trouble. Besides the 48-13 score and the glorious emergence of Shockley, there were other profits derived from this match. First, there was the defense, which put a choke hold on the Broncos, no particular reference here to their vaunted quarterback, Jared Zabransky. “Our defense set the tone in the first half that set up scores for the offense,” Richt said.
Then there were the running backs, in particular the rejuvenation of Tyson Browning and Tony Milton. Once they were starters, now have been bypassed by the sophomore threesome of Thomas Brown, Danny Ware and Kregg Lumpkin. But as the outcome became evident, they worked their way onto the scene. And Martrez Milner, the junior tight end who had lost his place to sophomore Leonard Pope. Milner caught 111 yards of passes and one touchdown.
Back to Zabransky, projected as the WAC player of the year, nothing could have been more unexpected than his disintegration. The quarterback was gone late in the first half and never returned. When Dan Hawkins was asked if he had been pulled because of injury, the Boise State coach barked, “Did you see the first half?”
Richt was not one to allow his athletes to dwell long in their exhilarated state. He redirected their attention to a hurdle ahead. “Next week we play a conference opponent that always gives us trouble,” he said. “We have to get ready for them.” So was attention redirected to South Carolina, and South Carolina’s visit to Sanford Stadium, with Steve Spurrier, the coach so many like to hate, in his second game at the wheel. Now, back to business in the neighborhood.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Categories: Furman Bisher, UGA / SEC
Tech the better team on The Plains
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Auburn, Ala. â€â€? Chan Gailey is 2-0 against Auburn. Reggie Ball is 2-0 against Auburn. Georgia Tech is 1-0 in 2005. Auburn, which didn’t lose last season, hasn’t won in this one. A lot of funny things happened here on a long hot Saturday night, but the most remarkable part was this:
There was nothing really funny about it. Tech was the better team. Tech was better than a team that hadn’t lost in 22 months. Think about that.
Tech jumped ahead and held on. Tech took better care of the football. The infamously erratic Reggie Ball threw only one interception, and the fledgling Tiger starter Brandon Cox threw four in the second half.
Gailey coached a terrific game. Tommy Tuberville, by way of contrast, abandoned the run way too early and doubtless is feeling the hot breath of Bobby Petrino, who nearly became Auburn’s coach the last time Tuberville lost a game, on the back of his skinny neck. Gailey, recently named the nation’s worst coach by SI.com, roundly outflanked the 2004 national coach of the year, which says something about SI.com and something about Tuberville but far more about the unassuming man who says nothing of note but up and beats somebody of note every blessed season.
The Jackets played it the way they had to play it: They scored on their first two possessions and thrust Auburn into a double-digit hole for the first time since calendar 2003. They could have put the game away 10 minutes earlier â€â€? Cox was terrible down the stretch, turning the ball over on five consecutive possessions â€â€? but it’s not the Jackets’ way to make things easy on themselves. But Travis Bell kicked a field goal with 92 seconds left to clinch it, and the strangest part was that a goodly number of Auburn fans had already taken their leave. Their team had been handled this night, and they knew it.
The last visitor to win its season opener in forbidding Jordan-Hare Stadium has done rather well for itself since. Southern Cal came here and won on Aug. 30, 2003, and the Trojans have gone on to consecutive national championships. This isn’t to suggest that Tech is aiming quite so high, but on the strength of this poised and powerful performance the Jackets are every bit a Top 25 team.
P.J. Daniels gained 111 yards. Ball completed eight of his first 10 passes. Calvin Johnson scored the essential first touchdown on a fade route, and Auburn should have asked another band of Tigers â€â€? the ones housed at Clemson â€â€? how effectively Johnson runs the fade in televised night games in the month of September. He essentially beat Clemson at Death Valley at the end of a breathless game 51 weeks ago, and here he’d given the Jackets a flying start into 2005.
Auburn finally got going, but something about this game seemed too big for the Tigers’ new backfield and its new defensive coordinator. Auburn could never get a handle on Daniels, and Cox kept completing passes to put the Tigers in position to take the lead, whereupon he would throw the ball to the Jackets and forfeit the chance.
The last interception was the killer. Needing a touchdown to win, Cox threw late over the middle. Gerris Wilkinson intercepted and returned the ball to the Auburn 20. The Jackets had only to cash in a field goal to nail this one down, and even a silly holding penalty â€â€? on a run up the middle! â€â€? couldn’t undo them.
They’d come too far and played too well. There have been times â€â€? at Florida State in 2003 and against Virginia Tech last season â€â€? when the Jackets squandered such chances, but clearly they’ve learned from failure. They got their field goal and took their famous victory and gave themselves a chance to make something truly major out of this new season. They went on the road and whipped a team that nobody could whip last year. Think about that.
Permalink | Comments (56) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
