The games that would determine the national championship were two months away. It would be another couple of weeks before Georgia Tech even clinched the ACC.
But the moment Tech’s 1990 football season reached transcendence can easily be traced to Nov. 3, when a trip to Charlottesville, Va., produced something no team in the school’s long history had ever done: defeat a No. 1 team on the road.
The Yellow Jackets did so the hard way. Twice, they fell behind the nation’s highest scoring program by two touchdowns, yielding 519 yards before somehow outscoring the Cavaliers 17-10 in the second half and giving a 19-year-old sophomore named Scott Sisson a chance to win the game with a 37-yard field goal with seven seconds to play.
Tech 41, Virginia 38.
Unranked when the season began, Tech, by then 7-0-1, vaulted into the top 10 the next week — for the first time since 1966, Bobby Dodd’s final season — putting into motion an unlikely chain of events that culminated in a 45-21 victory over Nebraska in the Citrus Bowl on New Year’s Day and the No. 1 final ranking by the UPI poll.
Set aside the fact that they would have to share the national title with Colorado, the AP champion. Nothing that happened on New Year’s Day would have been possible without what happened in Scott Stadium that sunny afternoon in November. Thousands and thousands of memories were made that day. Six people who were on the field share theirs:
(Some remarks were edited for brevity.)
Jim Lavin, Sr. G, River Ridge, La.
A transfer from West Point, Lavin joined the program during some of its darkest times when the Jackets lost 21 of 25 games. What Tech achieved that Saturday would help to blot all that out:
“We got down early, came back and and I think we proved to ourselves and to a lot of other people that we could beat the best teams in the country and come from behind to do it. I thought our team would be good, but I really didn’t have thoughts about winning a national championship. The Virginia game for me and for other guys, it became a possibility.
“It’s still one of the highlights of my life. It’s the highlight for a lot of people’s college careers, professional careers and even coaching careers. Obviously, Georgia Tech hasn’t won a national championship since. We’re all hoping that day will come again, but it hasn’t been duplicated. It’s probably the most special team that Georgia Tech has had in the last 50, 60 years.”
Calvin Tiggle, Sr. LB, Fort Washington, Md.
It was late and Tech was protecting a three-point lead. He had already made 18 tackles, intercepted a pass and recovered a fumble, which for some players constitutes a good month. But when Virginia assembled on third down at Tech’s 6-yard line with less than three minutes to play, Tiggle realized if the Cavaliers were going to pass, he was responsible for Herman Moore, Virginia’s gifted 6-foot-5 receiver who already had nine catches for 234 yards:
“My thoughts were I was going to hang with the big star, the ACC’s star at the time. He is their go-to person. My focus was to locate where he was. He was on the other side and I came across the field, and if (quarterback Shawn Moore) was going to throw it to him, I was going to knock it down. It was one of those things. My guess, my read was right. I was right where the ball was going at that moment in time.
“(Moore) had a fabulous day and at that point of the game, you’re going to go to the person you’ve been relying on the whole game. It would be me and him. When the ball came out, I didn’t know if I was (going to get to it) but I kept saying, ‘You got to get there. I got to get there.’ I was only able to get my fingertips on it to knock it away.
“I can’t remember how many tackles I had. Eighteen? Like wow. I didn’t know I had that.
“Herman lived in the (Washington) D.C area for a while and we connected and had lunch a couple times. It was wonderful. We talked about the game, laughed and joked.”
Shawn Jones, Soph. QB, Thomasville
After Tiggle’s breakup, a Virginia field goal tied the score at 38-38. Taking a last possession on the Tech 24, Jones, a sophomore on a team stocked with seniors, had about two minutes to win the day. In just 1:56, he moved the Jackets 56 yards to Virginia’s 20:
“We had been in situations before where we had to battle back. Once you learn how to win, you don’t really get shaken when adversity comes. Me personally, playing in that kind of environment was what I enjoy. It wasn’t whether we could come back and win. It was just a matter of executing that moment. It was fun playing that way.
“(When William Bell recovered his own fumble after a 13-yard gain on the second play), I was already into calling the next play. That’s one of the advantages of playing in coach (Bobby) Ross’ system. I was always prepared. I never looked at the sideline for a call. I always called my own plays in the two-minute drill. I wasn’t even concerned if he’d lost the ball.
“The way (Virginia) played, they were one of those teams that tried to do a lot of junk defensively. But on the (last) pass to Greg Lester, we had run the play before, but the way we did it this time, I turned a curl route into a square-in because (Lester) had to move around linebackers. He wound up finding a hole, which is what you want to do against a zone. They were trying not to give up a big play, so they were trying to get as deep as they could.
“I’m not going to say I was shocked. I was more surprised that they allowed him to get in the position he was in.”
Greg Lester, Jr. WR, Decatur
Lester wasn’t Jones’ favorite receiver that season. Emmett Merchant was. But the pair worked well together on Tech’s penultimate snap, when a slight deviation with a man in motion turned a short pass into a 15-yard strike deep into Cavaliers territory:
“In the pregame at the hotel during breakfast, there were a lot of newspaper articles we were reading about how bad we were going to get beat. Nobody picked us, so we kind of had a chip on our shoulder on the way to the game. Once we got on campus, they were throwing eggs at the bus and that kind of helped as well.
“That last pass, we had actually run it earlier. It’s called 8-13. I’d caught it on the sideline and went 20 yards. It’s designed for the slot guy to run a 5-yard out and the outside guy runs a curl. And (offensive coordinator Ralph) Friedgen, he was great at scheming and this time, he brought the outside receiver in motion, so we switched responsibilities. I pushed up about 12 yards and popped around, and I was wide open because everybody went with the out route.
“Shawn double-clutched there for a second, saw me pop open and hit me right between the numbers. That last drive, that’s something coach Friedgen took pride in practicing every Monday and Thursday. We’d get seven or eight reps of that drill every week against our first defense. I mean, we were well-prepared for that.”
Scott Sisson, Soph. PK, Marietta
No Tech kicker ever had a season like Sisson did as a freshman, when he set the school scoring record. But nothing prepares a kicker for what he faced in the south end of Scott Stadium as night fell:
“I knew it was a long way for our offense to go (on the last drive). I knew we were going to be probably trying a field goal from anything 60 yards in. I was just hoping it was going to be close enough where I didn’t over-kick it. At one point, were were looking at a 53-yard field goal right before that last big pass (to Lester). You can hit those long field goals, but the further out you go, you just have to hit them just right.
“When they got it inside the 40, I thought we were taking distance out of the equation. Now, it’s just a matter of staying focused and putting it down the middle and keeping your head down and all those good things you think about when you’re kicking.
“(While Virginia called consecutive timeouts before the attempt) I saw where coach Ross said my eyes were big as silver dollars, but you go back and watch the video and the coaches didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what to say. Bobby kept taking his hat off and rubbing that hair down and putting his hat back on. You could tell everybody was on edge. I remember (line coach Pat) Watson trying to tell me a joke, and he got about two-thirds of the way through it and he just kind of looked at the other coaches and said, ‘Aww, just forget it. Go out and kick the ball.” A lot of nervous laughter.
"The kick was pretty good. It was maybe a little left of center. Lined up at the right post, and it went right down the middle."
Bobby Ross, coach
As if Ross didn’t have enough to worry about, his 86-year-old father Bus was in the stadium for his first game since undergoing sextuple coronary bypass surgery seven months before. Father and son wound up in tears in the postgame locker room when Bus was awarded a game ball, highlighting the most emotional gameday of Ross’ career:
“We had just gotten the great news that my daughter-in-law was pregnant and my wife still gets after me for bringing that up in the postgame interview. We had lost our little granddaughter after a heart transplant, and it just meant an awful lot to me and the whole family for having that opportunity to have another child. We were very happy about that.
“Then the game itself was an unbelievable, emotional game because the swings were so big and so fast and abrupt. You were going to what you felt was the bottom then up to the top and then back to the bottom. We kind of knew it was going to be that way but, boy, we got slapped in the face early.
“We had some luck in there. No question about it. We were a good team and we had great character. I think you have to have that, that’s your building block for anything that’s going to be successful. They knew what a commitment was, and they made that commitment not only to football to the school. We got through it.
“I was kind of emotional afterwards because my dad was not doing well health-wise. I knew he was going to be at the game, but that was a total surprise to to me (when he showed up in the locker room). I still to this day don’t know who all was behind that, but I still have that picture of my dad with the ball. A very, very special thing.”
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