I’m sorry, but this has gone on long enough. Brian Gregory has to go. He’s a nice guy and all, but we can’t argue with his record: In nearly four full seasons, Georgia Tech is 55-68 overall, 19-49 in ACC regular-season play. His first team went 4-12 in the league. The best his fourth can manage is 5-13.
You can’t watch what unfolded Monday night at McCamish Pavilion and not believe that for the want of a better coach, yet another game was lost. Tech had No. 17 Louisville, which has issues of its own, all but beaten. The Jackets led 41-28 inside the final nine minutes, and we note for emphasis: The proud Cardinals had 28 points in 31 minutes.
If you’re Tech and you’re starved for any victory, you cannot lose this game. Being Tech, it did. Ahead 41-28, it was outscored 24-7. Louisville finally hit a 3-pointer and ramped up its defense. As coach Rick Pitino said: “We smelled the game.”
Tech fans surely smelled something less fragrant. But this was worse than North Carolina State, worse even than Virginia Tech. This was awful because the Jackets were a hair from their most significant victory of another failed season. A precious game was lost because a coach froze.
From the 8:46 mark of the second half until 5:55 remained, Tech was outscored 11-0. Over those two-plus minutes, Gregory didn’t call timeout. (He had four remaining.) To be fair, the under-8 media timeout was assessed, but Louisville scored five points thereafter to draw within two.
A game under control was allowed to spin out of control. Asked why he didn’t use a timeout over those two minutes and 51 seconds, Gregory said: “I can’t really remember, to be honest with you. One of things we’ve done is to fight through things like this.”
Really? When? The Jackets are 3-11 in games decided by five or fewer points or in overtime, all three victories coming in non-conference play. If there’s anything Gregory should know after three months of watching his team, it’s that it doesn’t “fight through things.” It fights, yes, but it gets rattled. That’s when a coach must intercede.
He waited until another Terry Rozier 3-pointer – his third in 3:11 – cut Tech’s lead to one to call timeout. Then Gregory did the weirdest thing: After Charles Mitchell followed a Marcus Georges-Hunt miss to make it a three-point lead, the coach who wanted his team to keep playing when Louisville was scoring stopped the game after his team scored. Huh?
Said Gregory: “I used one once we got a score, to calm down.”
In the final minutes, class and coaching showed. Louisville got the shots it wanted. Tech went to its staple play, essentially its only play: Georges-Hunt driving. Until Tadric Jackson’s trey with 1.6 seconds remaining and his team down four – the Jackets’ only 3-pointer – Tech scored one basket in four minutes. Georges-Hunt turned it over twice. Travis Jorgenson missed a trey and had a runner blocked.
After Georges-Hunt’s drive (hey, sometimes it works) tied it, Rozier beat the Jackets downcourt to give Louisville a lasting lead with 20 seconds left. By then Tech had burned all four timeouts – again to be fair, Mitchell called time to save a held ball – and couldn’t stop the clock. Louisville was down to none, too, but come the deciding moment, it got a good shot and Tech played bad defense. Seen this before?
Afterward a Hall of Famer gave Gregory the most lavish endorsement afforded a coach 30 games under .500 in league play. “I’m not telling their athletic director this guy’s going to be the next John Wooden,” Pitino said, “but he’s a top 15 basketball coach in this country.”
That was a nice thing to say, but it’s not true. Gregory might be the 15th-best coach in the ACC. He hasn’t recruited well enough. He hasn’t won enough. His team has lost too many games similar to Monday’s for it to be happenstance.
When the Jackets hired Gregory to replace Paul Hewitt, the best that could be said was that the new man was a solid hire – a replacement-level coach, to invoke a baseball image. In four seasons, Gregory has proved he’s no better than that. It’s time he was replaced.
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