Once perpetual underdogs, Georgia Tech now handling life as favorites

Underdog? Favorite?

No. 12 Georgia Tech finds itself in a state of limbo this week when it comes to that narrative. Perhaps ahead of its matchup with Duke at noon Saturday, it’s neither?

The Yellow Jackets claim they don’t really care all that much either way.

“We don’t talk about it much because like I’ve said before, we try to eliminate all external noises and stuff like that and focus on ourselves. Our opponents are faceless,” Tech quarterback Haynes King said. “If we handle our business everything will be fine.”

When Brent Key took over the Yellow Jackets on an interim basis in 2022, before becoming the program’s full-time coach in 2023, he built a team founded on the idea of being underdogs. And for the first two-plus seasons of his tenure the Jackets largely were just that: underdogs.

Since Key’s first game as head coach Oct. 1, 2022, at Pittsburgh, until the start of the current season, Tech had been listed by oddsmakers as an underdog 20 times. Thirteen of those 20 instances the opponent was favored to beat Tech by more than 10 points.

But the tide has turned in 2025. Only once, Sept. 13 against Clemson at home, has Tech not been favored. That is until this week as the Jackets are slight underdogs on the road against a Blue Devils team (4-2, 3-0 ACC) that Tech coach Brent Key called, “a damn good football team.”

“We’ve talked about that for a few weeks now, we’re gonna get everybody’s best. True competitors want everybody’s best,” Key said Monday on 680 The Fan. “True competitors don’t wanna go out on the field and play a lower-rate team that’s not playing hard or has nothing to play (for). You want everybody’s best shot every week when you’re a competitor. That’s how you truly prove how good you are. We know that and we understand that. We talk about protecting what we’ve done.”

Since Tech entered The Associated Press Top 25 on Sept. 14 ranked No. 18, the Jackets mostly have pushed the underdog mentality to the wayside, instead approaching each week with a confident mindset to go out and prove they are worthy of all the praise and national attention. So far, so good in that regard as the Jackets will be going for a fourth consecutive win as a ranked team.

That hasn’t happened since the 2009 team won seven in a row and was ranked No. 7 before losing to Georgia in the season finale.

The ’09 team certainly had the formula for handling prosperity and understanding that each week the opponent was going to want to be the one to spring the so-called upset. Key said he’s confident his team understands how to handle similar success.

“You know, I think earlier on as a head coach, you used that mentality, the almost, ‘Hey, you better be ready. You better know what you’re getting into,’ almost like out of a threat or a fear tactic. It’s not that way with this team,” Key said. “You know, I’m very transparent with them all the time about what we’re going to get. But we also focus on us and what type of version of ourselves are we going to have? Just to go out, just to see practice, I mean, you could close your eyes at practice (Tuesday) and you can hear the way it sounded and know that it was good football practice. And that tells me all I need to know.”