Georgia Tech now prays for chaos. The Yellow Jackets require a complete breakdown in the social fabric of the ACC Coastal Division. Dogs and cats sleeping together. Real Old Testament stuff.
Paul Johnson was absolutely correct when he looked around his neighborhood last week and noted, “I don’t know that anybody else is just way better than anybody else.” Only by occupying such a featureless landscape that is the ACC Coastal does Tech even dare to dream of any faint, longshot, nigh impossible route to the conference championship game.
So, you’re saying there’s a chance?
You can get to the title game with three losses. It has happened before, and no one has ever apologized for it.
Well, there's the first reach: It is incumbent upon the Yellow Jackets to win out, which would require conference victories over Duke, North Carolina, Virginia Tech and Virginia. While nothing in their 2016 resume suggests such a surge, they at least can take comfort in the fact that none of those opponents have shown themselves to be unbeatable (not a one has fewer than two overall losses).
North Carolina remains the favorite to win the Coastal, but it does not look quite so prohibitive as it did in the summer.
Winning out would give Tech the important head-to-head tiebreaker advantage over Carolina and Va. Tech, both of which would have to find another conference loss somewhere. There is a great deal here out of Georgia Tech’s control, but whose fault is that?
Teams ahead of Georgia Tech in the division standings with victories in hand against the Yellow Jackets – Pitt and Miami – both would have to finish with at least four conference losses. That means that Pitt would have to lose three out its remaining five ACC games; and the Hurricanes two out of four.
Perhaps in no other power conference could Tech be 1-3 and maintain uneven unrealistic hopes of a division championship (I’d consider Georgia’s options in the SEC East at 2-3 here, but there is only so much fantasy I can indulge in a day).
Leave it at the thought that the Yellow Jackets need their half of the ACC to be just as without form and dominance as it appears. They require much riotous confusion in the weeks to come.
So bring on the locusts and rivers of blood, then maybe we’ll talk some more about their future.
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