Nate Stimson doesn’t remember how late he and his teammates returned to the team hotel. He and his buddies had been out sampling South Florida nightlife, enjoying their first night of Georgia Tech’s trip to the Carquest Bowl in December 1997.
At the next day’s practice, coach George O’Leary had his own welcome prepared for the Yellow Jackets.
“Of course, coach O’Leary wasn’t dumb, and he knew that a lot of us had been out drinking the night before,” Stimson said this week. “He ran us that day until a bunch of us were puking. I guess that was his way of letting us know that we weren’t going to want to do that again.”
O’Leary’s methods evidently worked. Tech concluded the bowl trip — its first since 1991 — with a 35-30 win over West Virginia. It was the first of 18 consecutive bowls that the Jackets have played in, tied with Georgia for the third longest active streak behind Florida State and Virginia Tech. Barring an unlikely series of events, the run will come to an end this season, as the Jackets fell to 3-7 with a loss to Virginia Tech. The only way Tech can get in now is by beating Miami on Saturday and Georgia next week, and then hoping a shortage of bowl-eligible teams puts into play an NCAA provision that would allow the five 5-7 teams with the highest Academic Progress Rate scores (of which Tech would be one) to fill in the gaps.
With a loss to the Hurricanes, though, the streak will expire. It would do so at an auspicious location. Tech’s streak began at Sun Life Stadium — then Pro Player Stadium — and the last glorious link was added on New Year’s Eve 2014 in the same venue with the Jackets’ first Orange Bowl victory since 1951.
Former players interviewed this week received the likely end of the streak with disappointment, but no misgivings toward the 2015 team.
“I think the team will come back next year and do really well,” said Ron Rogers, a captain of the 1997 team, now living in Panama City, Fla., with his own civil engineering company. “They just had every bit of bad luck you could have.”
Izaan Cross, a captain of the 2012 team and now an assistant football coach at North Atlanta High, watched every game this season and recognized how close the team has been to turning around all but one of the losses.
“There’s no hard feelings,” he said. “I know the heart, I know the struggles and everything they go through on a daily basis to be able to uphold the Georgia Tech name.”
Cross seemed to feel most badly that the team would be deprived of the experience of a bowl trip — hanging out on the road with your teammates, being catered to by local hosts and scooping up bowl gifts.
“That’s what you go to college for, to experience that atmosphere,” Cross said.
Rogers recalled the team’s rise from a 1-10 season in 1994 — coach Bill Lewis’ final season — to a bowl when he was a senior. He also remembered the gratitude he felt during bowl practices that he was a senior, as O’Leary drove younger team members through scrimmages in the morning before the full team practiced in the afternoon.
“It was a huge accomplishment (to make a bowl game),” he said. “None of those guys on the team had ever been to one. It was a pretty big deal to get back up there.”
Stimson recalled the deluxe travel and hotel accommodations at the Carquest Bowl.
“It was a huge plane,” said Stimson, working in medical sales and living in west Cobb. “I remember thinking, like, Wow, you go to a bowl game, you get the biggest jetliner you can get.”
Former Tech running back P.J. Daniels and the 2003 team enjoyed one of the more unusual perks of a bowl trip — a snowmobiling excursion at the Humanitarian Bowl in Boise, Idaho. However, Daniels hit a bump and, in trying to keep control, accidentally throttled the accelerator and went flying into a wall of snow.
“I thought I was done,” he said. “’Oh, my career is over.’”
Frantic teammates dug Daniels out of the snow, relieved to find him intact. For Daniels, it was a powdery blessing. In the game, a 52-10 win over Tulsa, he ran for 307 yards, an NCAA record for a bowl game.
“I guess at that moment, I knew it was going to be a special moment because I survived death,” said Daniels, now living in San Diego, married with his first child on the way.
Extending the streak was an obligation — Daniels said he became aware of it on “Day 1.” But leave it to a man who makes a living teaching mindfulness and meditation to children — he wrote a children’s book on the topic, “Danny Yukon and the Secrets of the Amazing Lamp” — to have a balanced perspective on the streak coming to an apparent end.
“Everyone is going to have their down time,” he said. “Not everyone’s going to be able to win all the time. Like I said, I’m hoping for the best. I hope that they can squeak into and make it to a bowl game.”
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