Brent Key has coached a game in Raymond James Stadium before, the site of this month’s Gasparilla Bowl that pits his Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets against Central Florida on Dec. 22.
On Jan. 9, 2017, Key was the offensive line coach at Alabama for the national championship game at the Tampa, Fla., venue. Key and the Crimson Tide lost that day to Clemson 35-31.
Two years later Key left Alabama to return to his alma mater as an assistant coach. He took over the Jackets as an interim head coach in 2022 and then became the program’s full-time coach a little more than one year ago.
Now he returns to the venue which primarily serves as the home of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers under much different circumstances than his last trip. Key is trying to get the Jackets to their first winning season since 2018 and lead Tech to its first bowl victory since 2016.
A win for Key in 2017 would have garnered the ultimate prize. A win Dec. 22 would further cement the notion that his current program is headed in the right direction.
“Excited for our team to be able to continue our season right now and continue our season in a bowl game. Excited to go down to Tampa and play a quality opponent in the game,” he said Sunday. “I want to see our team not be satisfied with just getting to a bowl game. I want them to keep that hunger, to keep building on what we have built on, really, the last second part of the season of building this football team into what we want it to be.”
Not only with the venue of the Gasparilla Bowl be familiar to Key, the opposing uniforms will be as well.
Key left his assistant coaching job at Western Carolina in 2004 to join George O’Leary’s coaching staff at UCF in 2005. O’Leary, of course, won 52 games for the Jackets from 1994-2001 and Key played for the former Tech coach at the end of last century.
After one season as a graduate assistant with O’Leary at UCF, Key coached the program’s tight ends, running backs and offensive line and was the recruiting coordinator and special teams coordinator throughout his tenure. He was promoted to assistant head coach in 2012 and offensive coordinator in 2014.
When O’Leary resigned at the end of the 2015 season, it was expected by many that Key would be promoted to take O’Leary’s place as head coach. Instead, UCF reportedly gave Key $700,000 in lieu of an opportunity to become a head coach for the first time and gave the job to Scott Frost. Key moved on to coach the offensive line at Alabama from 2016-18 before returning to Tech.
Key didn’t have much to say Sunday when asked about the unique matchup between his alma mater and former employer, deflecting the question to speak about meeting his wife while working in Orlando, Fla., and adopting his oldest dog, Bear, while living there.
The former Tech offensive lineman did note that some of his former UCF players attended the Jackets’ regular-season finale Nov. 25 against top-ranked Georgia, players who may have been part of UCF bowl games with Key – like the 2009 St. Petersburg Bowl, the 2012 Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl or the 2014 St. Petersburg Bowl – all played at Tropicana Field, 20 miles from Tech’s 2023 bowl site of Raymond James Stadium.
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