When the going got tough, Georgia Tech got flattened. The ascendant Yellow Jackets entered the most famous venue in college football as a road favorite. They exited a 30-22 loser, and that score flattered them. After 59 minutes and 11 seconds, Tech trailed by 23.
For Tech, the galling part wasn’t that it lost at Notre Dame. The history of this sport is littered with good teams who’ve come here and gone away sad. What was sobering is how little resistance was offered, at least while the game was winnable. The Jackets had scored 134 points against two nobodies. Against the first somebody on the schedule, they weren’t really competitive.
OK, that’s a bit harsh. The Tech defense — always the lesser half of this program — yielded 457 yards but kept the game within reach, theoretically speaking, inside the final 10 minutes. But “within reach” presupposed that the famous offense might finally get going. The famous offense mustered seven points over the first 59:11.
“Clearly we were disappointed in the way we played,” Tech coach Paul Johnson said. “Right from the start, we kind of got rattled a little. The first half was awful.”
Johnson now has another reason to dislike Brian VanGorder: The wayfaring defensive coordinator — ex-Georgia, ex-Falcons, ex-everywhere — outflanked the creator of this strain of the spread option. (VanGorder’s junking of this spread option in his one year as Georgia Southern’s coach is believed to have irked Johnson.) Those plays that went for massive yardage against Alcorn State and Tulane? They went for minus yardage against VanGorder’s defenders.
Justin Thomas, the MVP of the Orange Bowl, was outdone by Notre Dame’s DeShone Kizer, making his first collegiate start. The Fighting Irish outgained Tech by 120 yards, and 122 of the Jackets’ output came after Notre Dame took a 30-7 lead. Except for one first-half drive — 80 yards in four plays after D.J. White’s end-zone interception kept the Irish from taking a double-digit lead — the Jackets found no traction.
As much as was made over Johnson versus VanGorder, this had more to do with Johnson’s players against VanGorder’s. Notre Dame is a top-10 team with top-10 talent; even last season, when the Jackets finished No. 7 and 8 in the final polls, this wasn’t a team of surpassing personnel except for Thomas. And when he’s not at his best — Saturday was close to Thomas at his worst — the Jackets aren’t apt to beat anybody any good.
Two plays, one in each half, told the tale. On third-and-20 midway through the first quarter, Kizer threw long for his splendid receiver Will Fuller. Chris Milton was in place to make a play on the ball. He did not. Fuller leaped and snagged a 46-yard touchdown pass. From then on, the Jackets were fighting the current.
Tech was lucky to be within 13-7 at the half. On the second half’s second snap, Thomas faked a handoff so deftly that he appeared bound for bountiful space around right end. The gap was closed posthaste by three defenders — not one or tow but three — who slammed into Thomas and knocked the ball loose. The Irish recovered. The resulting field goal made it a two-score game.
“We wanted to be aggressive,” Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly said. “We wanted to give (Thomas) a lot of looks he hadn’t seen before. We didn’t want to just line up in vanilla looks. That wasn’t going to work.”
For a time, this resembled the game at Virginia Tech last season, when the Jackets were outplayed most of the day but stole it at the end. Difference was, this was Notre Dame. Two last-minute Tech touchdowns sandwiched around an onside kick made this cosmetically close, but it wasn’t. The better team won. The better team was better by a lot.
“This was a program win,” Kelly said of beating the nation’s No. 14 team with a backup quarterback, and for Tech it seemed a program loss. The Jackets moved heaven and earth to crack the top 10 last season. Off the strength — more precisely the weakness — of this performance, it might be a while before they get back there.
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