The revolving door of Georgia Tech’s starter at B-back will stop on whichever player can hold onto the ball, will run to the right gap and has the potential to break a big play.
That it hasn’t been figured out and the Yellow Jackets are entering the 11th game, at Miami on Saturday, isn’t a good sign, B-back coach Bryan Cook acknowledged.
“You’d like to have a good idea of who does what, who’s your guy and what your pecking order is and what your production is going to be at this point of the season,” Cook said.
The problem is each of the three has a different problem.
Patrick Skov, a senior who started the first six games, holds onto the ball, but isn’t breaking the big, game-changing run. Though he has rushed for 338 yards, his longest run is 21 yards. He barely played in last week’s loss to Virginia Tech and on one of his runs went the wrong way, according to Johnson.
Marcus Marshall, a freshman who started the next three games, can break the big run, but has had trouble with fumbles. He has a team-leading 535 yards, including a run of 64 yards, the longest for a Tech back. But he also has three fumbles, two lost. Johnson implied that he had another one against Virginia Tech, but it wasn’t seen.
So the coaches turned to Marcus Allen against the Hokies. He was playing reasonably well in his first career start, with career highs for carries (16) and yards (75), until a critical fumble and dropped pass in the fourth quarter.
That turnover resulted in three lost fumbles for the B-backs in 10 games, compared with four in 14 games last season for B-backs Zach Laskey and Synjyn Days.
“You can’t fumble the ball,” Johnson said. “It’s called a handoff. When you do those things, you’re not going to win very many games.”
The coaches also weren’t happy that, once again, the B-backs failed to produce any big plays against the Hokies. Their longest run was nine yards. The coaches singled out Allen being tackled after a 5-yard gain on first-and-10 at the Hokies’ 44-yard line on Tech’s final drive. Johnson said Monday that Allen didn’t “stay on track,” which resulted in a Virginia Tech player reaching out and tackling him by his foot. It’s something that the coaches said few would notice, but helped determine the game’s outcome.
“Last year, we would have been on track, the guy wouldn’t have gotten him by the foot and it would have been either a touchdown or down to the 10-yard line, game over,” Johnson said.
Cook said that Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s practices were going to be critical to determining which player will start against the Hurricanes.
That it’s still a revolving door is not good.
“All those guys have a different thing that they bring to the table,” Cook said. “You’d like not to have to pull one for one reason so the other guy can do this, but that’s kind of where we’re at right now.”
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