They both had very positive things to say about Bobby Dodd Stadium. Both thought it was “pretty awesome” to have Power 5 football smack dab in Atlanta. I told them under the lights with a packed house it really is special and they seemed to believe it. This got us on the attendance discussion and they weren’t impressed, but also weren’t overly surprised at the lack of attendance, due to our record the last few years. They both felt the fans were nice(both live in Georgia and hate UGA almost as much as us, which is one reason I’ve become football buddies with them and said we were better than mutts), but one said he felt the atmosphere was a little too much like a baseball game in mid-July, meaning a lot of people were there for the social aspect, ocassionally looking on to see what was going on.
The BC fan said he was glad Johnson retired because they couldn’t beat him. Pitt fan thought Johnson was great at what he did, but he could understand why the program went another direction when he retired. He didn’t think there was an option coach impressive enough for P5 right now, but he thought our decade experiment was ultimately a success and that if another genius TO comes around, someone will give them a chance. They both were a little surprised when I told him Johnson was a little polarizing amongst our fans. The Pitt fan thought we won the Coastal “like five times” with him. Neither had much positive or negative to say about Collins. Everyone expected us to have a bit of a rebuild, but they both agreed that more wins should happen by year three(at the time of the Pitt game, this was more of a optimistic point. At the BC game, this was more of a negative, for obvious reasons). Both seemed to agree if we miss a bowl next year, it is probably best to move on. I pointed out that our irrelevancy causing them to not have very strong opinions of him either way was a negative against him. No one outside of Atlanta knows what we’re even doing the last few years. They both seemed to mostly agree with that, though the BC fan said that might be a good thing overall. If Year 4 does prove to be success, most people around the country will think of us from Option team to Year 4 without any thought of the years in between good or bad. Neither remembered that Collins lost to The Citadel.
Regarding the games themselves, they both thought Gibbs was the real deal, Thacker should be canned and neither knew what offense we were trying to run. I joked with both that I wasn’t sure we knew either.
