On a Saturday with 50 or more games, it’s easy to identify certain contests as being more important or attractive because they’re top-25 games or in-division games. Yet, those games stand out BEFORE, not after, the final result.
When one sifts through the whole of a weekend — and in mid-December, the full regular season — certain games stand out not for how they looked before kickoff, but after the final gun sounded.
There were bigger, sexier, and better-played games in week four, but none taught quite the kind of lessons the Georgia Tech-Duke tussle managed to convey. Saturday afternoon’s rain-soaked ACC Coastal clash between the Yellow Jackets and Blue Devils did not indict Paul Johnson or immunize David Cutcliffe from future criticism. However, it genuinely said something about each football program on a larger scale.
One of my best, most knowledgeable, and most patient Georgia Tech tweeps asked me Sunday morning for the link to an article I had written nearly two months ago on his beloved Yellow Jackets. This was the piece he had in mind.
To be honest, I had completely forgotten about that article, though when the score went final at the newly-renovated Wallace Wade Stadium on Saturday in Durham, N.C., my thoughts immediately flowed to the point that article had tried to express.
When the fourth quarter ended on Tobacco Road, it hit me: Georgia Tech’s season — though still salvageable in a likely-to-be-cluttered Coastal — is now almost certain to fall short of preseason expectations… at least the lofty ones I personally carried into the campaign. (Yes, I felt Georgia Tech would win the ACC at 12-1 and make the College Football Playoff.)
I’m Matt, and I’m a Tech-aholic.
Hi, Matt!
Jackets Anonymous, here we come.
The Yellow Jackets’ conceptually basic (though hugely difficult) task this season was, in three words, “BACK IT UP.” Back up the bold 2014 season with another strong one in 2015. There is still a window of opportunity for that to happen. Should this team run the table through the Georgia game and make a New Year’s Six bowl (stranger things have happened), it could say that it backed up 2014 with a 2015 worthy of its newfound stature. However, any additional loss pretty much dashes that goal.
Georgia Tech’s pattern — not confined to any single coach (and paradoxically, occurring in fact under highly-esteemed coaches over many decades) — of not backing up one big season with another will almost certainly continue. It’s not a Paul Johnson commentary, but a reflection of how this school — so steeped in football tradition thanks to men named John W. Heisman and Bobby Dodd — has just not been able to maintain a position of relative superiority over the rest of the ACC once it has tasted the view from the mountaintop in a given year.
Georgia Tech has, in this way, played into the most eternally fascinating dynamic in all of college sports, not just college football: Players spend, at most, four years in a program, and currently enjoy (in many cases) no more than two high-impact years before they scoot on to the professional ranks. Yet, even with the transitory nature of college sports, some programs continue to exhibit the same characteristics, one decade after the next.
Paul Johnson isn’t a failure for joining Bud Carson, Bill Curry, Bobby Ross, and George O’Leary as Georgia Tech coaches who couldn’t produce consecutive seasons marked by achievement at a particularly high level. He is merely the latest of several highly accomplished football men to fall short of taking the Jackets to that next plateau — a plateau marked not by a visit to the pinnacle, but by an extended vacation on the pinnacle.
You can’t blame a coach too much if he’s done something that hasn’t been done over the course of roughly half a century. The point of fascination with Georgia Tech after the loss to Duke is the football program over the long march of time, not as much with Johnson himself. Johnson substantially and powerfully affirmed his career and credentials with his 2014 season. Now he’s coaching not for job security (as he was last year), but for legacy.
Speaking of legacy, let’s move to Duke, the other half of this complex and counterintuitive story.
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If you were to look at Georgia Tech and Duke over the past five years, you would probably arrive at the conclusion that Duke — in terms of the number of seasons involved — comes closer to fulfilling its potential on a more regular basis than Georgia Tech does. If “number of good seasons” is the measure of any two (or more) programs, the Blue Devils — in the short run — have done a little bit more than the Yellow Jackets.
However, one must obviously ask, “What about other measurements of programs over time?” Indeed. Number of good seasons in a certain window is just one way of comparing two football operations. How high does a program fly when it reaches or approaches its ceiling? How many division titles or conference championship games or January bowl games does a program make? If these questions are the central ones in a program comparison — and there’s no reason why they can’t or shouldn’t be — Georgia Tech wins the comparison with Duke as the better, stronger program.
What we have, then, is a contrast: Georgia Tech makes Orange Bowls and reaches more ACC title games than Duke does. The Yellow Jackets have certainly been the program with more high-end achievements and historically memorable seasons over the past 50 years. When Georgia Tech comes up with a big individual year, the Jackets have a lot to defend and live up to the next year, making their task harder.
For Duke, it’s very different. When eight wins and a bowl loss represent a higher level of achievement than most of the previous 25 years, there’s not as much to defend, not as high a standard to live up to. Duke can attain “staying power” or “consistency” by meeting a lower threshold. Georgia Tech has to jump over a much higher bar to do that.
So, in light of Duke’s win over Tech on Saturday, we can say two things: First, the Ramblin’ Wreck is still searching for the elusive back-to-back nationally significant stack of seasons. Second, though Duke doesn’t have to climb as high in a given season to consolidate the gains it has made under David Cutcliffe… the Blue Devils continue to get there. They continue to avoid falling off the cliff and into the 4-8, 5-7 territory they regularly inhabited not too long ago.
Duke registered a major achievement on Saturday in terms of attaining even more staying power in college football and the ACC. Georgia Tech failed to do the same. It’s not a knock on Paul Johnson, but a great credit to Cutcliffe, that these two statements can and do coexist.
Give immense credit to Duke for showing such immense resilience — not just within the context of a game or an eight-day span (after a tough loss to Northwestern) or a season, but in a series of years.
Also acknowledge, before you’re inclined to bury Georgia Tech or rip Paul Johnson, that the Jackets — at the beginning of 2014 — were not supposed to be in a position to defend an Orange Bowl championship 12 months later. They are a team that’s taken a hit in 2015, but they do enjoy the kind of first-world football problem Duke would sorely love to have.
