Georgia Tech is No. 4 in a different BCS

By Steve Hummer

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Over a monthlong haul, ending next Saturday in Durham, N.C., Georgia Tech will have played in succession four of the country’s highest-ranked schools.

Granted, that’s according to a different sort of BCS system — call it the Brain Capacity Series.

One after the other, Tech had scheduled Virginia then Vanderbilt, Wake Forest then Duke. What a grey matter gauntlet, a series of Homeric battles of football intellect.

OK, obviously they’re not all eggheads bumping into each other on the football field. “Not everybody out there is a 4.0 engineer, that’s not the way it is,” said Georgia Tech athletic director Dan Radakovich.

But every opponent in this third of the Yellow Jackets’ schedule is ranked among the most elite academic institutions in the latest U.S. News and World Report survey. Tech came in behind them all, but still a relatively lofty No. 35.

And every one of them share the challenges of trying to maintain those scholarly credentials while also playing compelling football, to simultaneously nurture and knock heads.

Tech faces challenge

Tech has measured up well on the field during this slate of brain games. With not quite the same dominance, the university compares suitably off the field.

“We’re not going to be playing a Trivial Pursuit game at the 50-yard line, but I think we would fare well at that also,” Radakovich said .

“Put me in a classroom with anybody, especially math, I got it,” said Yellow Jackets A-back Anthony Allen. (Point of information: Georgia Tech’s designations of A-backs and B-backs do not stand for the players’ grade point averages).

Quirky Tech lineman Dan Voss suggested a spelling bee in the Georgia Dome to settle the issue of intellect once and for all.

Under Paul Johnson, Georgia Tech, the most historically accomplished team of this bunch, has reasserted the quaint premise that a haughty academic reputation and a few happy game days don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Jim Grobe awakened Wake — who fell to the the Yellow Jackets in overtime Saturday — and led the Demon Deacons to an ACC title in 2006. No one has called them Weak Forest in quite a while.

David Cutcliffe even has Duke football, which won but four ACC games in the 2000s before he arrived in ’08, relevant at least to the beginning of November. The Blue Devils fell out of a first-place division tie with a 19-6 loss to North Carolina Saturday.

The question around such programs is can they consistently serve both masters of academics and football without compromising one or the other?

“We’re trying. We think we can. I don’t know why you can’t,” Johnson said .

Getting the right coach for these situations is the common utmost need. For instance, both Johnson (head coach at Navy for six seasons) and Grobe (an assistant at Air Force for 11) gained the ultimate experience in dealing with young men with higher obligations than football.

“You learn how to be organized and not waste time, you just can’t do it,” Grobe said. “You can’t go out and stand around for three hours in practice every day and spend too much time in meetings. You might win some football games but you’re not going to have kids around very long at good academic schools.”

Recruiting academics

And getting the right kind of player to commit to these demanding programs is the next priority. Duke Athletics Director Kevin White claims that “it’s a new day, I’m sensing it” as far as recruits taking the leap and signing with the Blue Devils and other programs of high academic pedigree.

Even those programs without a tradition of football success.

“Kids want to come to a place where they feel they can compete at the highest level athletically and earn a world-class degree,” he said. “They don’t want either one to marginalize the other. The needle’s moving (in the direction of the high-end academic program), it’s clearly moving.”

The Blue Devils already have won more ACC games this season than in the previous five seasons combined, so his euphoria is understandable.

“Our story is not very complicated,” he said. “We’ve been bad for a long time and we’re working like crazy to become a very competitive football program.

“I think the needle’s moving, and as the needle continues to move, the ability to compete consistently improves.”

Georgia Tech has had a unique view on the state of “smart” football with this current run through some of the most elite schools, those it would consider peers academically.

In the case of Voss, a senior lineman with a highly active sense of whimsy, it is best to seek a different, slightly skewed, version of that view.

So, then, just wondering, Dan, on the topic of trash talk, is the quality of wolfing better among supposedly brainier players?

“Yeah, we got guys like Sean Bedford (a center majoring in aerospace engineering) arguing about how many decimals they know for pi, that kind of stuff,” he joked.

Seriously, one of the enduring memories the 296-pound Voss may take from this heady slice of the schedule is the upgraded taunts during his trip to Vanderbilt last week.

“Normally the fans — I’m not going to name any schools — aren’t as intelligent as the guys at Vanderbilt,” Voss said. “They were right up against our bench, insulting me about my weight. I’m OK with that, people get on me about that all the time.”

One Vandy fan suggested — loudly — that if he shaved his beard, he could gain two-tenths of a second on his 40-yard dash time.

Another cleverly borrowed from some football terminology. “One guy goes, ‘Hey 77, looks like you lost contain on the belly!’ I started laughing. That’s the most well thought out insult I’ve ever heard.”

See, an elite, expensive education and football can co-exist.