It was the rich.
A combination of Gen Xers and Boomers with a Ralph Freidgen hardon that had lasted decades, who were well connected people to the GTAA with no sense of scope, scale, or understanding about Georgia Tech's natural place in the college football world because they had drunk their own kool aid. They were watching UGA and Clemson do what UGA and Clemson have the ability to do, which is corner the market on the best players in the country by a combination of hot coeds, crip majors, under the table payola, and over the table facilities outlays, like the $40 million Clemson football complex. Because UGA and Clemson are our regular rivals they wanted to be 50/50 in these games in terms of results, and accepting any less was "accepting mediocrity," without realizing that GT's natural place as a school is less than mediocre football. A campus full of hot coeds at GT is out of the question. Crip majors are banned by the UGA controlled board of regents. They refused to pay the Can Newton style payola, theoretically because they were honorable and following the NCAA rules, when in fact it turns out they were refusing to pay the Cam Newton payola because they're cheap bastards. We know this with 100% certainty because the NCAA legalized the payola, athletic departments can now pay players as long as they launder the money in official ways, and they still refused to buy us any players. The only possible way to compete with hamstrung talent is with a gimmick. But they literally ran the gimmick out of town and decided they were going to beat UGA and Clemson by adopting the exact same offensive and defensive systems as UGA and Clemson with worse players.
I know these assholes. I tailgated with these assholes. Some of you are these assholes and some of you aren't. But all of you, assholes or not, are watching a Georgia Tech team that is playing to its natural level as a football school. And the assholes that I tailgated with, alumni who ran Paul Johnson out of town and refused to buy us any players, are now watching Clemson and Georgia games because their wives attended there.
GT is a cripple who tied one hand intentionally behind his back and decided to get in a street fight. Have fun. Nobody was a bigger fan than I was, that ref for the Notre Dame Game knows it, and I quit four years ago. I still haven't even checked the score from this past weekend.
If you want to be a real football school in this climate you have to start by going private to get out from under the Board of Regents, add programs to compete with UGA in all phases of academics, add crip majors to hide athletes, and get your boosters to start funneling money into NCAA approved payola. There's your blueprint. Until you do that your coach literally doesn't matter. Nobody in the Paul Johnson tree is coming back here, and there isn't a stronger gimmick around to compensate for tying one hand behind your back.
