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Thursday, September 8, 2005
Task for Jackets is to maintain focus
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
For the sake of focusing, Woody Hayes used to lock his Ohio State players in a monastery before Rose Bowl games. Then there was Jackie Sherrill motivating his Mississippi State bunch to rip Texas by castrating a bull. While I matriculated at Miami (Ohio) University, the head coach always smashed a pumpkin on the locker room floor to signal that rival Bowling Green and its wretched orange uniforms had arrived on the schedule.
Are you listening, Georgia Tech players, suffering from college football’s version of attention deficit disorder? I’m guessing the Yellow Jackets coaches did much this week to keep their players thinking about North Carolina on Saturday instead of last week’s upset at Auburn, the latest Young Jeezy video and everything else.
Well, did Tech coaches do something along these lines?
“If there was a magic trick to keeping players focused, then none of us would ever have a problem,” said Tech offensive coordinator Patrick Nix. “There’s a lot more to trying to keep guys focused than people think. You never know when that big test in school is coming up, and you never know when a girlfriend is going to break up with a guy. What’s going on [with the Hurricane Katrina aftermath] also has affected several of our guys. We had one player who had to go to his grandmother’s funeral at the beginning of last week. We’ve got to realize that a guy who is 18 to 22 years old is going to have a lot of distractions.”
Exhibit A: The Jekylls (as in Jekyll and Hyde) as opposed to the Jackets (as in, why has Tech been so dramatically erratic during the Chan Gailey era?).
Since Gailey joined the Jackets before the 2002 season, each of their huge victories over North Carolina State, Auburn (the first time), Maryland and Clemson were followed by huge losses. The worst of the worse was Tech’s 41-17 disaster at Duke after the Maryland game. You also had the Jackets getting plastered last season at North Carolina (34-13) after their miracle over Clemson at Death Valley.
This shouldn’t happen, not as often as it has to a Tech program with at least decent talent. After all, monasteries, bulls and pumpkins notwithstanding, the truly good teams find ways to keep the lows from canceling the highs of a season.
Exhibit B: Nix’s 1993 Auburn squad that played 11 times without a loss. You don’t go undefeated by keeping one eye on the past and the other on the future. So what were the tricks used by those Tigers to keep both eyes on the present?
“The big part of it was that we didn’t have a bunch of tricks. We just had a bunch of seniors who were playing for us, and generally speaking, seniors are able to keep their focus better than freshmen and sophomores,” said Nix, a former Tigers quarterback. “In those days, you had a lot more than 85 scholarships, so you really didn’t have a lot of young guys in the lineup. The older guys make fewer mistakes, and life for them is a lot more stable than it is for others.”
For the record, Tech has five seniors starting on defense and three on offense, which means the Jackets have enough players who should know better. Even so, veteran leadership often isn’t enough, because such almost was the case for that undefeated Auburn team. Those Tigers won by less than five points against Ole Miss, Vanderbilt and Florida.
That Auburn team still won, though. Which really is the point: If the Jackets wish to flirt with the elite this season, they must discover ways to triumph more often than not in spite of distractions.
“The important thing is that we’re in a thing called life, and it’s a lot bigger than football,” Nix said. “If you didn’t have any school, and if you never had any tragedies, and if you never had anything go wrong, that’s one thing. But from Coach Gailey on down, we want to teach our guys about dealing with life.”
That’s fine. Just teach Tech players about dealing with life and whoever is next on their schedule â€â€? especially after huge victories.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Categories: Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Weekend predictions: Dogs, Tech win
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Lou Holtz, former football coach and still 10 percent humanoid, with the rest meat-byproducts, recently predicted South Carolina would upset Georgia.
I find this amusing, though not because Holtz doesn’t even have his own Friday column, and therefore his projections aren’t considered as scientific absolutes, like, say, the theory of relativity and Weekend Predictions. Rather, this is funny because in his 174 years of coaching, Holtz never once predicted a victory for his own team, even when he knew he was coming off a really good illegal offseason.
“This week we play Georgia. If we don’t lose the game 92-6, it’s only because a meteor crushed the team bus on the way to the stadium,� Holtz would say. “By the way, if you’re with the NCAA, I just saw Lou Holtz and he went that-a-way.�
This week, Georgia plays South Carolina.
Now, doesn’t that sound a lot better than saying, “This week, Georgia plays Steve Spurrier?�
With Florida, Spurrier went 11-1 against Georgia.
With Florida, Spurrier went 6-0 against Ray Goff and his eventual remains, and then planted a big wet one on Jim Donnan, 47-7.
With Florida, Spurrier beat Georgia in Sanford Stadium 10 years ago, 52-17. (Somebody threw a cup of tobaccy juice at him after the game. Of course, they missed and hit a security guy.)
With Florida. With Florida. With Florida.
Spurrier is not with Florida.
With South Carolina, is he.
With gout, he might as well be.
The Dogs are favored by 18 points over South Carolina. If the line goes any higher, the SEC mandates they play at least one series blindfolded.
The last time a Spurrier team was this lightly regarded?
“Should’ve been probably when we played the Eagles a few times,â€? he said. The Washington Redskins — a mutation of gout.
Carolina opened unimpressively against Central Florida. Georgia opened with a first-time starter at quarterback (D.J. Shockley) who threw five touchdowns and ran for another. Holtz opened at Golden Corral, stuffing rolls in his pocket. Or so I hear.
I know. It’s a lot of points. But it’s not Florida.
Dogs cover.
North Carolina at Central Atlanta
Georgia Tech’s defense allowed Auburn quarterback Brandon Cox to have one of those Jeff George-type games: 342 yards, four interceptions, nine brain-seizures. But the Jackets held on for an upset and now find themselves with a national ranking… and are projected to win a game by 12? Welcome to the Achilles’ heel of the Chan Gailey regime. Nothing comes easy. Tech wins, but take the Heels and the points.
Missy State at Auburn
The Tigers opened the season with four interceptions, a fumble and 11 penalties, including five illegal procedures. I’m thinking cyanide would’ve been a lot quicker. War Beagle, baby. Tigers win, but take the other Bulldogs and the 15.
Notre Dame at Michigan
One win and suddenly everybody is rushing to Blockbuster to rent “Knute Rockne: All American.� The Irish even had a visit this week from nine-time Stanley Cup-winning coach Scotty Bowman, who told the players: “I may have coached in Michigan, but I don’t root for Michigan.� Even Hall of Famers stand on the wrong sideline sometimes. Wolves cover the seven.
Clemson at Maryland
Last season, Clemson beat Miami one week, then lost to Duke the next. The Tigers upset Texas A&M last week. Landing gear is half off at the Esso Station this week. Maryland is somewhere between Duke and breathing. Good enough. Terps win.
Southern Missy at Alabama
A team starts the season with Middle Tennessee State and Southern Miss, it thinks, “2-0. Cool.� But that was, “Booo,� not “Coooool,� players heard when they led only 9-7 late in the first half of a 26-7 win over MTSU. Prepare for four quarters of problems this week. Southern is twice the team Bama faced and has had its resolve tested by Katrina. Upset? No. But close. Take the dozen.
Permalink | Comments (65) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
Give me some direction
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
I don’t just wake up in the morning and go to a college game. I plot my route. I gather my maps. (I have many.) I consider alternate routes. I leave ridiculously early. I prepare.
See, I hate sitting in traffic. I know, I know — nobody likes it. Me, I don’t just not like it. I HATE it. And no sporting event (with the exception of NASCAR, for which I take similar evasive action) has traffic like a college football game. So here’s what I do:
I’ve tried five or six different ways to Athens. I park in downtown Auburn and walk a mile rather than risk getting caught in the congestion near Jordan-Hare. I drive 20 miles out of the way to get to Neyland Stadium. I drive 30 miles out of the way to get back from Tuscaloosa after a night game. I don’t venture onto Assembly Street in Columbia. (Though Bluff Road is getting just as bad.) I know a back way into Clemson and I stick to it even though, after a Duke-Clemson basketball game in 1985, I hit a deer availing myself of this two-lane escape.
As I was going through my usual rigamarole last week — Columbia on Thursday, Auburn on Saturday — I got to thinking: Am I the only one this neurotic? Does anybody else take such circuitous and laborious measures? Or do you folks just sit in gridlock and grin and bear it? Really, I’d like to know.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
