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Friday, October 20, 2006
Jackets learn to think big
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Here I was, lunching this week with a friend named Carl, Georgia Tech class of ‘86, and he nearly caused me to gag on my turkey sub. He reflected on a Yellow Jackets’ football team that is streaking in the vicinity of that prolific Joe Hamilton bunch and the national champions of 16 seasons ago. Then he sighed before saying, “All we have to do is split between road games at Clemson and North Carolina State, and we’ll be fine.”
That’s old Tech thinking. That’s what got folks wishing to have Buzz shove his stinger down Dave Braine’s throat after the former athletics director was interpreted (wrongly, I might add) as saying the Jackets only could be mediocre in football.
None of that old Tech thinking applies to this current bunch with five straight victories and a heavy dose of new Tech thinking after its only loss against Notre Dame. “After we win a game and then another, it just hits you, like, we can end up playing in a BCS game,” said Calvin Johnson, the Jackets’ otherworldly receiver, delivering the truth. “Me and my roommate, J.J. [wide receiver James Johnson], we’ll talk about it now and then. With the confidence we’re gaining throughout the season, you can’t help but think about it.”
Just thought you might want to know, especially with the Jackets preparing to match their No. 13 ranking tonight in Death Valley against No. 12 Clemson in search of more than bragging rights for I-85. This also goes further than Tech wishing to pad its lead in the Coastal Division of the ACC. See the Jackets’ season, ranging from the crushing of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg to the Maryland comeback to the lack of a letdown against pitiful Virginia.
This is a Tech team that finally gets it by thinking big. So big that the Jackets realize that you can’t overlook little (such as Duke and North Carolina the rest of the way) to reach big (such as the Orange instead of the Seattle, Silicon Valley, Humanitarian, Champs Sports and Emerald bowls that have featured the Jackets during in the past five years). They were smacked around last December by an inferior Utah team in San Francisco during the Emerald Bowl. Afterward, Tech linebacker Gerris Wilkinson told me with disgust as a departing senior, “We’ve been close at times and far at times, and that’s been the problem ever since I’ve been here at Georgia Tech. We just can’t play consistently an entire season.”
Fortunately, for Tech Nation, many of the 69 returning players who were around for that Utah disaster nearly matched Wilkinson’s anger.
Thus the following: Two weeks after the Emerald Bowl, Chan Gailey called a team meeting, mostly to discuss the start of winter conditioning, and the Tech players couldn’t wait for their head coach to stop talking. That’s because they wanted the coaches to leave, so they could discuss a few things among themselves.
Loudly, too, and the subject was that old Tech thinking.
“I remember distinctly [quarterback Reggie Ball] stepping up and telling all of us that, ‘Really, our focus this season is a BCS bowl, and we’re not going to be happy unless we achieve that goal,’ ” defensive tackle Joe Anoai said earlier this week. “We’ve been rolling since then, because we have a good understanding of the big picture, but we also have a very great understanding of the small things that it takes to get there. We believe we are a great team, and we believe we have the athletes and the program here at Tech to build a national power in Atlanta.”
The key phrase: “We believe,” as opposed to the old Tech thinking of “We aren’t even considering any of that.”
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