Georgia Tech will be looking to get back in the win column at 4 p.m. Saturday when it hosts Alabama A&M in the Yellow Jackets’ last home game until Jan. 6.
Tech turned in another lackluster road performance Tuesday when it lost 76-62 at Georgia, Tech’s second road defeat in as many road trips this season. The Jackets had a real opportunity to prove their mettle having upset No. 21 Mississippi State and No. 7 Duke in the two previous games. Instead, they couldn’t find the bottom of net or get enough key defensive stops in a loss in which they trailed for all but 39 seconds – when the score was tied 0-0.
Georgia led by 23 midway through the second half and, to its credit, Tech continued to battle and went on a 9-0 run at that point to give itself hope being down 59-45. The Bulldogs immediately answered with a 9-2 spurt to end any doubt about the outcome.
“When you’re a team that’s learning each other, trying to do different things and figure it out, if you’re down 9-10 points you gotta look at it as a four-possession game. There’s no 10, 11, 12-point play,” Tech first-year coach Damon Stoudamire said. “That’s where we gotta get better. We kept compounding the mistake with a mistake. You can’t allow Georgia – they get a bucket then we come up and we pass, shot. One pass, shot. You can’t do that on the road. That’s like a turnover.
“We’re coming down, playing defense 15-20 seconds and then we’re making them play defense for four. It just kills you.”
Stoudamire had said that he had warned his team ahead of time that they would be going into a hornet’s nest against a good Georgia team. And now that Tech, who received two votes in the latest Associated Press poll, had beaten two ranked teams, the Jackets could no longer sneak up on anyone.
Guarding against the let-down and executing against one proved easier said than done.
The Jackets didn’t particularly fall short on the stat sheet in the loss. They had only eight turnovers, grabbed 17 offensive rebounds, recorded seven steals and dealt out 15 assists. Problem was, that assist total should have been much greater as Tech missed 51 shots – the most a Tech team has missed since missing 63 in a four-overtime loss to Georgia State in 2020.
“I just thought we didn’t pass it well. Fifteen assists, it doesn’t reflect the game,” Stoudamire said. “When the game was on, when it was the meat and potatoes of the game, that’s not what it looked like. We gotta get better from that standpoint of passing the ball to each other. When we were passing the ball and it was moving, we were scoring. But when we weren’t, it didn’t look right.”
Alabama A&M has had a rough go of it through seven games and hasn’t been on the court since a 78-59 loss at Vanderbilt on Saturday. The Bulldogs’ lone win came Nov. 29 at home in a double-overtime battle with Tennessee State.
The Bulldogs (1-6), who have only played one home game, are coming off a 15-18 season a year ago. Dailin Smith is leading A&M in scoring (13.4 points per game) and rebounds (four per game).
Tech has won all five previous meetings against A&M with an average margin of victory of 17.8.
The Jackets will be off next week before traveling to New York City to face Penn State at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 16. That will be followed by a trip to Hawaii for the Diamond Head Classic on Dec. 21-24 which precedes the resumption of ACC play Jan. 3 at Florida State.
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