It’s tempting to see Georgia Tech’s 2015 season as a worst-case scenario of youth and injury and a wicked schedule and lousy luck. At 3-9, it was the Yellow Jackets’ most wretched showing since 1994, when Bill Lewis started (but didn’t end) the year as coach. But if 2015 was Tech’s generational nadir, wasn’t 2014, which culminated in an Orange Bowl victory, also an outlier?
Fun with numbers: Add the 3-9 of 2015 to the 11-3 of 2014 and divide by two; you get 7-6 as the average. Add the wins and losses from 2010 through 2013 and divide by four; you get 7.0-6.25. That’s six seasons, or 75 percent of Paul Johnson’s time at Tech, over which his Jackets have essentially been a 7-6 team. Is that good enough?
Every coach insists recruiting rankings mean little, but Johnson is singular in his disdain. Rivals has rated only one of his nine Tech signing classes among the nation’s top 40. That came last year, when the Jackets were 39th. If that was a post-Orange bounce, it proved fleeting.
As of 3 p.m. Wednesday, Tech's signing class ranked 70th, the second-lowest showing under Johnson. (247 Sports had the Jackets 54th, down from last season's 44th.) Per Rivals, Tech's class ranked next-to-last among the 14 ACC schools and last in the Coastal Division. FYI, half the Coastal's other six members just changed coaches.
Even as we offer the boilerplate disclaimer — ratings are inexact, et cetera — we note that Tech’s division has toughened with the addition of Mark Richt, Justin Fuente and Bronco Mendenhall. Given that Tech has been, on average, a 7-6 team over six seasons, how enthused should its fans be today?
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