Red-zone touchdowns a focus for Georgia Tech’s offense

Georgia Tech, on the surface, is a very good offense when it comes to scoring from inside the opponent’s 20-yard line.

But a scratch beneath that surface reveals Tech’s ability to complete red-zone trips with touchdowns instead of field goals is a flaw.

On Nov. 1 at North Carolina State, that flaw was a fatal one in a 48-36 loss.

“The discipline has to maintain itself in the highest-pressure moments,” Tech coach Brent Key said Tuesday. “You sit there and say, ‘We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that, this needs to happen, we can’t do this,’ that’s all a bunch of bull crap. We need to line up and we need to get the ball in the end zone, bottom line. If we want to continue to play meaningful games in the month of November, we need to score touchdowns.”

Tech’s offense has made 39 trips to the red zone and scored 37 times. Only Eastern Michigan, Oklahoma, Memphis, Hawaii and UCLA have scored at a higher percentage (and only Memphis, which has played 10 games, has been inside the 20 more times than the Yellow Jackets).

But of those 39 red-zone trips, Tech has crossed the goal line only 24 times, a touchdown percentage of 61.5% which ranks 79th nationally. The 24 red-zone touchdowns ranks 47th.

“Really just us executing and being able to strain, whether it’s executing on making a throw. When it happens in the red zone you’re gonna have an extra (defender), you’re gonna have to run through somebody,” Tech quarterback Haynes King said Wednesday about the team’s red-zone executions. “Whether it’s blocking, running, catching, stuff like that, it’s just executing and finding a way and the will power to get the job done.”

Tech certainly had played with fire in red-zone execution at times throughout the first two months of the season before the issue came to a head in the loss at N.C. State.

In a 30-29 overtime win at Wake Forest on Sept. 27, the Jackets made six trips to the red zone and scored only three touchdowns. Only 1 of 2 trips to the red zone in an Oct. 18 win at Duke resulted in a touchdown. Against Syracuse on Oct. 25, the Jackets ventured inside the 20 six times and once again only came away with three touchdowns (one of those trips ended with the clock running out in the fourth quarter).

Play-calling could be questioned or an easy scapegoat for the issue, but Key countered that the execution of the play called is an important part of the equation.

“Me and (Tech offensive coordinator) Buster (Faulkner) sit down every Sunday and we go through all the different situational calls, and it’d be something (and Faulkner says), ‘Man, I’m beating myself up on that (call).’ You can always second guess yourself as a play caller, right? That’s easy to have 20-20 hindsight, but we have to be able to execute as well. And that’s what I love about him. He’s going to look at himself No. 1. That’s what great coaches do. They look at themselves and we put ourselves in that position and say, ‘What can we do better?’

“Then it becomes the execution of the player. We’ve had three times that we had penalties that backed us up. We’ve been consistent with the field goals, but my gosh, too many times inside the 10-yard line — the penalties have been huge. We had drops. I mean right there alone, that’s four or five (field goals instead of touchdowns).”