Brent Key has drawn attention to Georgia Tech by putting steak before sizzle

Brent Key never chased the attention. But he and his Georgia Tech football program, which long has been a secondary player locally and nationally, have it in a volume that is jarring.

Increasing attendance at Bobby Dodd Stadium, solid TV viewership, and the visibility of Key and quarterback Haynes King in national and local media are but three outcomes for the No. 12 Yellow Jackets, who play at Duke on Saturday in pursuit of the program’s first 7-0 start since 1966.

Who could have imagined?

“We started out in this thing trying to make this the most no-frills, no-fun, blue-collar, workmanlike thing,” Key told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It’s almost come full circle, and, like, this has become cool again.”

An element of Tech’s unexpected publicity surge that I find intriguing: The eyeballs and relevance that Key has achieved are exactly what Key’s predecessor pitched to a fan base hungry for a bigger stage.

However, Geoff Collins’ strategy was essentially Key’s in reverse. Collins was hired with the idea that his sizzle and marketing skill would bring attention and cultivate an image that could draw recruits to help the Jackets win big. The plan failed catastrophically.

Key has done practically the opposite. He has built a program with an identity of toughness and discipline, epitomized by the immeasurably rugged King. He has not sought fanfare. And in what appears to be a breakthrough season, the success has followed. And as a result, Tech has stirred its fan base and become a focal point of the season, both locally and nationally, by what it has done on the field.

“There wasn’t branding, per se,” Key said. “I just don’t believe in that. … To put the cart before the horse, it’s not the way I’ve been brought up. Everybody I’ve ever played or worked for, it’s about doing your job and doing your job well and correcting mistakes and improving.”

In Collins’ defense — not the most frequently used phrase in discussions of the Jackets football program — gaining notice and trying to portray Tech as cool were what he was hired to do. Further, whether fans or media want to admit it, there was plenty of support for it (at least initially). And his highly regarded first recruiting class would suggest that — at least to a degree — it worked.

The problem was that brands, however finely cultivated, don’t block or tackle. And when Collins was fired four games into the 2022 season and Key was named interim, that’s exactly where he started. He dramatically raised the level of contact in practice. Speaking this week, he called himself fortunate this transition took place before name, image and likeness payments and the transfer portal created the potential for mass roster turnover.

“Because I don’t know if, this day and age, you can take over a program and do what we did in those eight weeks,” Key said, half joking. “I think they might come put you in handcuffs and take you off the practice field.”

That emphasis has only grown. Key said that, both in spring practice and preseason camp, the team conducted more than 1,000 full-speed snaps, far from the norm.

“(Players) wanted more and more of it, and we just kept going and going and going until it’s really developed and evolved into this thing where their capacity for the tough times, their capacity for hard is way higher than I ever envisioned it could be,” Key said.

It has yielded results — and accompanying attention — that similarly have defied expectations for a program that went nine years between Top 25 rankings and saw fan and media interest shrink.

Tech has not been ranked this high in the regular season since 2011. Three years after drawing an announced home crowd of fewer than 30,000 for the first time since 1989 (outside of the 2020 COVID-19 season), attendance for Saturday’s win over Virginia Tech (50,878) was the highest at Bobby Dodd Stadium for an ACC game since 2016.

On Monday, Key’s slate of interviews included multiple national and local outlets, interest that hasn’t existed on that scale in recent years. He’s being speculated as a candidate for the Penn State opening.

King is having his story told by national college football voices and is being touted as a Heisman Trophy candidate.

It’s publicity you can’t buy, let alone manufacture, with varying uniform combinations or social-media posts.

It is not the reputation building that means the most to Key, though.

“When somebody says, ‘You guys are the hardest-playing team or toughest-playing team that we’ve ever played,’ that makes me smile,” he said.

It is not merely a hypothetical situation.

“Coaches I respect to the utmost say it,” Key said. “If you have that, you can continue to build the program the way you want it, and the wins will come. That’s what’s taking place.”