Jackets look to overhaul psyche, save season

By Matt Winkeljohn

For the AJC

Reality for the Georgia Tech basketball team is fairly simple: The Yellow Jackets need to beat North Carolina once more on Thursday to get serious about the postseason.

Losers of six of its final nine games, while finishing the regular season 19-11 and seventh in the ACC, Tech is on the NCAA Tournament bubble. The Jackets lately have played as if dressed in straitjackets, their trademark defense barely recognizable and coach Paul Hewitt telling everyone they've played with too great a sense of urgency rather than not enough.

A team ranked much of the first half of the season looks as if it stopped having fun.

There is hope and time to change that in the ACC Tournament, though no self-respecting Tech fan previously would have predicted this trip to Greensboro would end up a salvage mission.

The first step in a successful intervention is acknowledgement. Good news: The Jackets admit they have issues, that they’ve been distracted by speculation about their coach, that they’ve spent too much energy on the big picture and not enough on the details that matter more.

“I feel like, yes, sometimes we tend to overthink things and sit up and listen to things that go on outside the court,” senior Zachery Peacock said. “I feel like we tend to focus on the wrong things at times.”

Said junior Gani Lawal, “It does look like that sometimes. We’ve just got to settle down and play our game. We just need to play basketball."

In sum, they’ve been thrown off task by trying to do too much.

“Yeah, we end up speeding up a little bit, taking shots we don’t want to take or we wouldn’t normally take,” Glen Rice Jr. said. “I think that might be because you’re thinking, ‘We’ve got to do this now, we’ve got to win this game.’"

In a season of strange psychology, the Jackets drawing the Tar Heels (16-15) might be a good thing. Tech can become the first team other than Duke to beat UNC three times in a season since the Jackets did it 25 years ago. The Tar Heels are young and even more erratic than the Jackets, looking nothing like the defending national champions.

Once 11-3 with wins over eventual Big 10 co-champions Michigan State and Ohio State, the Heels lost in overtime at College of Charleston. That triggered a 5-12 collapse. This marks the first time UNC has had to play on Thursday in the ACC Tournament.

The Jackets need to recognize the opportunity at hand and not press because of it. Rice said the Jackets are trying to balance their feelings. They're trying to differentiate between trying hard and playing hard. They hear the message that playing should be fun.

Hewitt, repeating a conversation he had with Peacock, said, “He was talking about how hard he was trying, and I said, ‘Nobody’s going to send you to jail. Just go out and play and relax.’ There is some of that sometimes where guys try hard and maybe they care too much. They want to win.”

Whether Tech needs to win just one game in Greensboro to reach the NCAA Tournament is debatable. How they approach that game is not.

Derrick Favors suggested he and the other players ignore the media and outside expectations. “I think if we come out and play like we know we’re capable, we can beat any team in the country,” he said.

Peacock said, "Winning solves the problems. If we just win out, we have nothing to worry about.”

Looking for a template? Favors might be ground zero. From a fan’s perspective, the freshman often appears detached on the court. Hewitt has come to appreciate Favors’ability to stay cool under pressure. 

Perhaps the Jackets need to do themselves a favor and make like Favors. It might get them back on track.

“One of the things I really have grown to appreciate about him is he really doesn’t let little things frustrate him,” Hewitt said. “He plays through things."