You might even feel a little bad for Paul Johnson in the aftermath of Georgia Tech’s 69-6 victory over Alcorn State.
What’s he going to carp about after this one?
It is a coach’s sacred duty to find his team’s flaws and treat them each with complete contempt.
The selection seems pretty limited here in what amounted to a gussied up exhibition game. Tech kept scoring and went without a penalty throughout the night. But here are a few little scabs Johnson might pick this week as the Yellow Jackets prepare for Tulane a week from Saturday:
*A botched extra point snap in the first quarter. Somewhere that point might matter.
*Marcus Marshall’s fumble late in the second quarter. That led to nothing but a missed field goal, but it’s the mistake that counts. That the freshman ran for 184 yards should be a mitigating statistic.
“He can hit some big plays,” Marshall’s coach said. And then quickly added, “He needs to learn to hang onto that football; we’ll have a little discussion on that.”
*The Braves came out to begin the second half and hung a 75-yard scoring drive on the second line defense (only one starter was in when Arron Baker ran it in from a yard out).
Yes, they seem like trivial matters in the bigger picture, but it is the coach’s job to magnify them. Johnson no doubt will find more, but those were only the most obvious ones.
Already Johnson was preparing his themes for the next week of practice.
“We got a lot of things to fix. Special teams — we dropped two punts; snapped an extra point over our guy’s head; they ran a kickoff back from about nine yards deep in the endzone. There’s a lot of things we can fix,” Johnson said.
“And on offense and defense we busted a lot of stuff. We had a ton of mixed assignments and busts. Hopefully you’ll make the most improvement from Game One to Game Two, especially the young guys.”
