How were the coaches able to come in and teach this offense to CCG's recruits but now can't seem to teach it to recruits specifically brought in for the system?
See, here's what's happened over a long time frame.
Everytime GT has won a game since 2008, the media credits the coaching instead of the players. And that infuriates opposing coaches, because it means they got "outcoached" instead of outplayed. More, it infuriates their fans, because their fans can be forgiving of an amateur player who gets beat, but a coach is being paid, and so they get pissed off that they're
paying someone inferior. So after that happens too many times, the coach gets fired.
So coaches really don't like playing GT because their job is at stake much moreso than it would be playing another team. So that leads to three things:
1) All coaches we play against spend extra time prepping vs us than all their other opponents, no matter how important that other opponent might be in the grand scheme of their season. We know this because they say so in their press conferences. ND was the preeminent example, going so far as to hire a dude who's one job for
an entire year was to scheme our game.
2) All coaches work their players twice as hard going into the GT game. We know this by the statistically proven "GT Hangover" phenomena, where teams are more likely to be upset the week after GT than any other week on their schedule.
3) New coaching hires in the Coastal Division, and at Clemson, are done specifically with defending the option in mind. Foster was retained for this reason, Venables was hired for this reason, Bronco Mendenhall was hired for this reason, Mark Richt was hired at Miami for this reason, etc. If you went around the country right now and tried to find a who's who of football minds that know how to defend this thing, probably half of them would be routinely on our schedule.
So the climate we're up against now, as compared to 2008, is
very different. Honestly if you dropped this team back in time into our 2008 schedule, it might easily run the table, and in spectacular fashion.
The one thing we're sorta lucky about, is Kirby Smart is not an option guru. And might not even be a particularly good head coach. UGA did not focus specifically on GT with their hire because they've had such good long term success against us.