What are the REAL reasons our football program can't compete?

My opinion is that Dodd is dead and gone and his decision had little to do with our problems today. We have had 30 years of athletic directors and head coaches who are responsible along with the Hill. Our AD's want to take care of their buddies from the coaching profession and have ripped us off on contracts time and time again. Who cares if the pay is low if contract pays such generous severance when the coach is ever fired. Some coaches are still being paid after being long gone. The stadium expansion was daft. The last coach who took winning football seriously was O'Leary who left us as soon as he could, leaving behind a mammoth debt.

Our AA is filled with unconcerned and even cynical staff who go home and put on their red and black or orange and blue. Our coaches and AD should not be necessarily homers but our other support staff damn sure should.
 
OptionJacket said:
No one at GT cares. That’s the entire problem. The President doesn’t care because none of the admin care so there is no pressure
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This. 100%. Until this changes, it will be difficult to have any success save a season here or there.
 
Agree that the decision to leave the ACC is not the problem. I assure you that at Church Street Station on New Year’s Day in 1991 as we celebrated the Citrus Bowl win no one was concerned about leaving the SEC. Earlier that year we had been to the Final 4. The Dodd decision would have appeared vindicated at that point in time.

The real issue has been that conference expansion has not been good for Georgia Tech. The ominous cloud on the horizon that day that we chose to ignore was that FSU was coming. That made football success much harder. The addition of schools so that we have fifteen conference schools has made the checks larger, I guess, than they would have been, but championships harder to come by and significant conference rivalries diluted.

Even so, there was more success than failure in football in the O’Leary, Johnson and Gailey eras, a Final Four with Hewitt and a blip on the screen with an ACC tournament title last year. Other sports are fine - baseball, golf, tennis, volleyball, women’s hoops.

We need to straighten out our football and basketball programs, and with the right hires that could happen. We need to improve our messaging, marketing and sales forces, which are all poor. It may be less the fault of Dodd and more the fault of later AD’s that we could not pull off a return to an expanding SEC. As for the Big 10, are Maryland and Rutgers and even Nebraska fans really enjoying the Big 10? I am sure the athletic departments enjoy cashing the checks, but how relevant are those schools in football and basketball?

Perhaps we should quietly be considering a risky, but perhaps beneficial move of reorganization. Some schools mired in mediocrity in these geographically extended conferences of fourteen to sixteen members might soon be ready to form a smaller, more regional conference. With the right schools it could be a homerun. Maybe we could hire Phil Michelson to work on that.

But the short run siruation is clear. - Collins and Pastner, get better quickly, or we have to get rid of them and make great hires. Neither of them should hide behind the excuse that their failure is not their fault but due to institutional barriers unique to Georgia Tech.
 
ricejacket said:
This article pinpoints the exact cause....the $ difference between the SEC/BIG10 and the ACC. As much as I would've hated it, perhaps Tech should've accepted the Big10 invite.

abc7chicago.com

New ACC commissioner Jim Phillips faces big challenges without easy answers

Jim Phillips faces a daunting task: Figure out how to bring in more money, have more football contenders and rewrite the league's image as the ACC looks toward an uncertain future.
abc7chicago.com abc7chicago.com
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Perhaps? Of course Tech should have accepted the invite! The B1G sends member schools $54million per year, the ACC $27 million. This is one of the biggest no-brainers in the history of no-brainers. Assuming there was a real, actionable offer, whoever is responsible for rejecting it should be drug out into the street and shot. The obviously and only answer to the thread title is money.

You want better coaches? You have to pay them.
You want better marketing? Pay for it.
You want better recruiting? Guess what makes that happen.

$27million per year pays for a lot of all of those things. What else are we going to do to get that kind of income? Have a bake sale?

Plus, it should have been pretty obvious to anyone even a decade ago that the ACC was a sinking ship. There is only one conference that's even remotely close to the $EC in terms of brand, fan support, and media coverage. Joining them should been a "Where do I sign?" moment.
 
Do we know if we ever really received an offer from the B1G or was that exploratory conversations that didn't come to fruition? If we did someone should write a book about that.
 
ramblinwise1 said:
Do we know if we ever really received an offer from the B1G or was that exploratory conversations that didn't come to fruition? If we did someone should write a book about that.
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I'm sure only a few insiders really know for sure, but there was lots of talk in 2012 about us turning the B1G down. It cropped up again somewhat in 2015. I'm guessing there's something to all the rumors, and even if the deal wasn't great, it would probably have been best for us if we'd made it happen. It'd be nice if the B1G approached us again after the $EC added Texas and Oklahoma. Honestly, just about any deal the B1G offered would likely be better than the ACC.
 
What a bunch of ööööing whiners.

Air Force competes every damn year. 10-3 and 11-2 the last two full seasons.

ööööing ARMY went 9-4 last year and 9-3 the year before.

FAU before last year's Willie Taggart (cannot coach) fueled debacle: 11-3, 5-7, 11-3 and 5-4.

Setting aside the 2020 Covid year, Wake Forest hasn't had a losing season since 2015. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021 . . . all winning seasons. Not a 3 win season in sight.

SMU was 7-3 during 2020 Covid, but toss that out and they were still 10-3 in 2019 and 8-4 in 2021.

Western Michigan hasn't had a losing season since 2013.

For öööö sake, again setting aside the 2020 Covid year, Northern Illinois has gone 8-6, 5-7 and 9-5 their last three seasons.

I could cite others. Central Michigan. San Diego State (12-2 last year; 10-3 in 2019). Liberty. Coastal Carolina.

Are these schools landing all the 4 star croots??? Is NIL destroying them?

Meanwhile for you idiots who think the Big Fourteen would have been some kind of salvation, take a good look at Maryland, Rutgers and Nebraska(!).


Anyway . . . if only there was some kind of an offensive scheme that did not rely on landing big NIL money 4 star croots to execute it, and at the same time maybe controlled the ball so your non-four-star croot defense wouldn't be on the field so much.

The answer always has been and always will be . . . better coaches. Coaches that can take their'n and beat your'se and take your'se and beat their'n.
 
1982Jacket said:
The answer always has been and always will be . . . better coaches. Coaches that can take their'n and beat your'se and take your'se and beat their'n.
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You have an interesting take here. So Mark Richt was a better coach than Paul Johnson, as well as second year head coach Kirby Smart. Dabo Swinney became a better coach in a mere...seven years? Cutcliffe was a better coach down the stretch, too. Wow, crazy when you think about it. Kirby Smart thinks coaching is overrated but he probably doesn't know much.
 
gtchief said:
You have an interesting take here. So Mark Richt was a better coach than Paul Johnson, as well as second year head coach Kirby Smart. Dabo Swinney became a better coach in a mere...seven years? Cutcliffe was a better coach down the stretch, too. Wow, crazy when you think about it. Kirby Smart thinks coaching is overrated but he probably doesn't know much.
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No, you're right. Spot on! Coaching doesn't matter. We should fire CGC and hire the fluffer at the Cheetah - of the "what'll ya have" guy at the V - and save a few million.
 
1982Jacket said:
No, you're right. Spot on! Coaching doesn't matter.
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I never said that. I said Kirby Smart said that coaching is overrated. And before that I used your own logic to conclude that you believe he's a better coach than Paul Johnson because he took his and wiped the floor with Paul's more often than not. Why do the dinosaurs on here enjoy building strawmen with hyperbole?
 
gtchief said:
I never said that. I said Kirby Smart said that coaching is overrated. And before that I used your own logic to conclude that you believe he's a better coach than Paul Johnson because he took his and wiped the floor with Paul's more often than not. Why do the dinosaurs on here enjoy building strawmen with hyperbole?
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Coaching certainly does matter, but as the game has changed, recruiting and player development are the utmost importance. Even guys like Saban will tell you he isn’t necessarily the best in game coach, Kirby certainly isn’t. But you can take 2 and 3 star guys and coach em up and it will only go so far. The new college football landscape is very difficult for programs like that
 
Coaching matters a lot. Maybe it doesn't so much at a school like UGA that can attract top 5 recruiting classes, but it does at GT.

You can look at the past 3 years at GT to know coaching matters.
 
gtchief said:
I never said that. I said Kirby Smart said that coaching is overrated. And before that I used your own logic to conclude that you believe he's a better coach than Paul Johnson because he took his and wiped the floor with Paul's more often than not. Why do the dinosaurs on here enjoy building strawmen with hyperbole?
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And I never said any of the öööö that your hyperbolic rant claimed either.
 
donsue said:
Coaching certainly does matter, but as the game has changed, recruiting and player development are the utmost importance. Even guys like Saban will tell you he isn’t necessarily the best in game coach, Kirby certainly isn’t. But you can take 2 and 3 star guys and coach em up and it will only go so far. The new college football landscape is very difficult for programs like that
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Since when the öööö were recruiting and player development not parts of coaching? Especially player development. Even just developimg players for one game.
 
GTWannaBee said:
This is exactly the reason uga is so successful. Their fans don’t base their financial support of the program on whether or not they think a game is winnable. They pay their money, go to the games, and root for the team no matter what - purely emotionally driven.
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Exactly right. If Georgia wins three games a year for the next three years and we beat them 50-0 every year, their stadium will be packed with happy fans and all their coaches will get sympathy cards and big raises. Oh yes, Georgia fans just live to be supportive and only care about using football as an excuse for giving deserving young people a world class education.
 
1982Jacket said:
And I never said any of the öööö that your hyperbolic rant claimed either.
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Of course you didn't say it. I concluded it from your stupid drivel

"The answer always has been and always will be . . . better coaches. Coaches that can take their'n and beat your'se and take your'se and beat their'n"

You define "better coaches" as ones that can beat the other and some romanticized bullshit afterwards. It's a very simple take but it's how you defined it. So, are you walking back on your take that Kirby Smart became a better coach than Paul Johnson in a mere two years, or denying reality?
 
Sorry, but Kirby is a better coach than Johnson. There is more to coaching than just X’s and O’s. I think the problem that many fans have is they are using the old mindset as someone just mentioned about “take theirs and beat yours and take yours and beat theirs”. Those days are long gone. Being a good coach the last 20 years includes hundreds of things to build a program. Kirby has excelled at those way beyond any coach GT has had recently. Things such as 1) Admin buy in, 2) Raising money and building a network of bagmen, 3) Nationwide recruiting, 4) Luring high end assistants 5) Filling stadiums, etc.

Now, do I believe Johnson is a better X’s and O’s coach than Kirby. Yes I do. But X’s and O’s are probably 5th or 6th on the list of things a successful coach has to be good at in todays game. Kirby just ended a 40 year drought and beat the dynasty to do it. He built them up doing all the small things just like we all saw Dabo do and Riley will do at USC. That is now how coaches are judged. No one cares if you are a savant game day coach and win 6-7 games and aren’t ranked. Johnson was a game day savant in my opinion but he lacked in so many other areas that it didn’t really matter outside a handful of seasons.

What has our coach done since our last game to build the program? I know Kirby was all over South Georgia at many high schools and meeting many money guys. Has Collins been doing those things that ultimately lead to success? He has had 3 years so we should have started seeing these things start to payoff, but we haven’t. That tells me the hundreds of other coaching duties aren’t being handled. GT is doing the minimum to field a team. Recruit Atlanta, rotate thru assistants, no bagmen, no admin buy in, etc. Would our coach ever sit a higher ranked QB for a walk on?
 
1982Jacket said:
Since when the öööö were recruiting and player development not parts of coaching? Especially player development. Even just developimg players for one game.
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No one said that. My point is the way things are moving, the idea of “catching lightning in a bottle” by hiring some under the radar guru of a coach is not only extremely unlikely, but even so, “coaching up” 2 and 3 star guys can only take you so far. Don’t know why you didn’t get that
 
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