Brent Key and company are a confident bunch at ACC Football Kickoff

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — It was Georgia Tech’s turn Wednesday to take part in the ACC Football Kickoff. A quintet of Yellow Jackets strutted around the downtown venue of the Hilton Charlotte Uptown in their finest suits, navigating the gantlet of media requests and answering questions ad nauseam about their team, the coming season and all topics in between.

The annual event is an exercise only in prognosticating about the unknown.

“We can sit up here as head coaches and talk about the season, but none of us really have any idea how it’s going to unfold,” Tech coach Brent Key said. “We can’t control that. All we can control is the work we put in, how we prepare, how we build our team and how we play for each other.”

Key was joined Wednesday by offensive lineman Keylan Rutledge, quarterback Haynes King, wide receiver Malik Rutherford and linebacker Kyle Efford. That group, sans Rutledge, appeared on the main stage for the Tech news conference at 2 p.m. and before then had an entire day filled with radio interviews, TV appearances and photo shoots.

King and Key had done this before. Efford, Rutherford and Rutledge were experiencing it for the first time.

“Been cool, been different. Kind of out-of-my-element kind of deal,” Rutledge said. “But it’s been fun.”

Said Efford: “Part of the reason I came on media day is because I (couldn’t) really care less what anyone says to me about anything. The media’s really not gonna affect me. I could have been out here at an empty table feeling fine.”

The Jackets are scheduled to report to campus Monday, before the season’s first practice Tuesday. There are heightened expectations for this team, regionally and nationally.

After back-to-back 7-6 seasons, Key has a roster filled with experienced playmakers on offense and defense. He also has retained a large chunk of his coaching staff and created a brand and culture that’s unmistakable in college football circles.

That’s all well and good, Key said, but it doesn’t mean anyone is going to hand Tech a championship trophy at season’s end.

“We know at this point we’ve established an identity of this football team, and that’s not going to change. Everyone in the country knows who we are as a football team, and we embrace that,” Key said. “You sign up to play a game with Georgia Tech, and people know what they’re going to get. They know what they’re in store for. That’s something that we’ve worked extremely hard to build over the last two years, the identity that we have as a team.

“Look, we’re going to celebrate that. We’re going to embrace that and make sure that we enjoy the fruits of the labor it’s taken to put that together because it’s not going to stop. You come to Georgia Tech, you have no choice but to be a part of that identity as a football player.

“So when people talk about our identity, yeah, we get excited about it, but that’s done nothing to guarantee us anything during the season. To celebrate an identity just gives you a chance and an opportunity at the end of the year to be able to possibly celebrate more things. We’ve got a ways to go. We’re working to continue to close that gap that we’ve been working for the last two seasons.”

The Jackets are a little more than a month from opening the season, when they travel to Colorado on Aug. 29 to face a Buffaloes team that went 9-4 in 2024 and that is coached by former Braves and Falcons star Deion Sanders. Two weeks later, Tech hosts rival Clemson, the preseason favorite by many publications to be the team to beat in the ACC.

There are eight games between that Clemson matchup Sept. 13 and the finale against Georgia on Nov. 28 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. It’s been several years since the Jackets topped the Bulldogs (2016), and an even longer time since they’ve done so in Atlanta (1999).

Key and King and the rest of Wednesday’s crew had an air of confidence about them that maybe 2025 is the year to put something special together, from the end of August through the end of November.