Brian Gregory’s first nine months at Georgia Tech were much about altering the mood of his program. The coach first needed to change the music in the plummeting elevator car of Tech basketball before he could finish work on the brakes.
He has sounded, and continues to sound, the confident, hopeful tune.
Ah, but January is the month where good vibrations go to die.
It is the month in college basketball when the schedule tilts away from opponents with ampersands and hyphens in their names toward those with real, unpunctuated heft. As of the beginning of last week, the average RPI of Tech’s first 13 opponents was 171. For those from January on, that number shrunk to 67.
It is the month that signals the beginning of conference play, a time when a team’s flaws are subject to the most public auditing.
The ACC has in it 11 other teams Tech might have played Saturday afternoon in Gregory’s conference debut. Contrary to the conference’s reputation, not every one of them is a monster.
Still, Gregory had to draw Duke and college basketball’s all-time winningest coach for openers. Mike Krzyzewski always looms as a great challenge for both spell-check software and opposing coaches.
“He’s only got 750 more wins than I do — I don’t know what the big deal is, Gregory joked. The difference between K’s 913 W’s and Gregory’s 179 actually is only 734.
To the credit of the lesser decorated coach, Tech came out Saturday afternoon and played with reckless disregard for Duke’s reputation, showing much verve before losing 81-74. Tech fell to 7-8, but gained a few places in the respect rankings.
Gregory’s coaching roots stretch back beyond Dayton and the Atlantic-10 Conference to his days as an assistant at Michigan State. He’s from a very competitive neighborhood. The prospect of life in the ACC shouldn’t shake him.
Krzyzewski certainly wasn’t thinking that it would. He paid Gregory this compliment afterward: “His background is of championship ilk, and his team is going to play that way.”
Gregory is not going to be allowed to gradually warm to his new challenge. Rather, he is being thrown right into the blender, meeting all three of the ACC teams ranked in the Top 25 — Duke, North Carolina and Virginia — in January.
Gregory knew the Tech job was going to be a difficult assignment when he arrived from Dayton. He has tried to prepare everyone for the fact that a team that has gone 14-34 in its conference the past three seasons is not going to suddenly rocket to the top.
“There’s a lot of different things you need to do [to fix Tech basketball, and the perception of Tech basketball]. And I think we’re trying to do every single one of them,” he said last week. “Sometimes the last step of that process is the winning on the court. You can’t skip any steps. We’re trying to get more engaged in the community, trying to get more engaged with our former players, trying to never say no to an opportunity to sell our program in some fashion.”
As for the short-term realities, this is the time of year when the concrete starts setting on those.
Gregory came in thinking it was going to be difficult spending this season homeless while the gym on campus undergoes a complete makeover. By last Wednesday night’s final non-conference game against Alabama, he had a much clearer idea of just how weird the arrangement is. For a home game, his team boarded a bus six times over the course of that day (round trip from campus to a shoot-around, to the pregame meal/meeting at the school’s conference center and to the game).
The seats for their “home” game Saturday at Philips Arena were heavily populated by blue-shirted Dookies, giving the place the feel of a Cameron South, only with many more amenities.
Only through the Yellow Jackets’ surprising effort did they win back the building. They kept the game close, and thanks to a couple of spectacular dunks by Jason Morris greatly revved up the lungs of those in Tech colors.
“It’s been hard, no question. Philips is not nearly as nice as it’s going to be when we have our own place, when we have a true home court and there’s a home-court advantage,” Gregory said.
As Tech has played before crowds of just more than 3,000 early this year at Gwinnett Arena — the draw of Duke boosted Saturday’s attendance to 9,277 — back at Gregory’s old school, Dayton, they were drawing 12,000 and more for every home date.
“Basketball is really, really important there. One of the things we need to do is make it important around here again,” Gregory said last week.
Saturday was the kind of effort that may well inspire return business at the turnstiles.
But Gregory knows that January ultimately looms as a cruel month. “The schedule is brutal, but we can’t lose sight that we’ve made a commitment that every day we’re going to get better. As important as the games are, they can’t override the process we’re going through together right now.”
Just how much further that process must take Tech will be hammered home from here to the finish. For as heartening as Saturday may have been, the fact is Gregory will travel to N.C. State on Wednesday on the skids of a four-game losing streak.
The coach will have some more soothing sounds to compose before the hardest months of a hard season are done.
Here is a preview:
“Do I want more wins? Yeah, of course, and we’re going to get there. But we’re not going to skip any steps. I think we’re making some positive steps,” he said even before the showing against Duke.
And as for keeping his players engaged as the losses mount, he added, “Like with any 18- to 22-year-old, there’s going to be a sense of, ‘OK, I’m working harder, committing myself more, why aren’t I having instant success?’ I understand that. I got to keep telling them it’s not going to happen overnight.
“Just because we’re practicing better and giving a greater effort on a daily basis, you don’t snap your fingers and win every game. The thing that we have to make sure our guys understand is that we have to keep doing things every day to put ourselves in position to deserve victories. That doesn’t mean you’ll get them. But the ones we’ll get, we’ll deserve.”
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