jgtengineer
Helluva Engineer
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It has to do with the complete dismissal of anything positive and the constant need to paint the old as only bad to support a narrative. The game itself changed from 2008 to 2018. We saw everyone else dumping millions upon millions of dollars into recruiting. We saw the rise and fall of entire social media platforms and methods of interaction. And we saw a shift in the student population and thus alumni population of the school from a crowd that valued football to one that's first exposure was likely setting foot on campus not only with declining youth participation but the trend of moving away from certain trends in the highschool level which means a shrinking fanbase.
Unfortunately things just started to fall apart and despite some great success hinting at the historic ability to perform the lack of support from the AA meant long term success was unsustainable.
Rule Changes also continued to hamper the way the game was played making the method of play out dated and eventually stale try doing tenuta's stunting defense when holding is basically legal see what happens last I checked it was tenuta getting shelled out of UVA by the quick passing and spread passing attacks of modern offenses. Johnson retired and honestly I don't blame him and he did it in such a way that it gave the AD the best amount of time out there to get ahead of the curve on a coaching search.
However, this isn't unheard of and no one looks back at say Bobby Bowden and says you know he sucked his last 3 years and that was all that mattered. Or the fact that Jimbo fisher won a natty then proceeded to drop off. Hell Ed Orgeron never had success until well... you get the point.
Our fanbase has this inane habit of completely discounting the positive in anything in the past. Even belittling the contributions of past student athletes because someone blows some smoke up their asses about how much better we can be while also getting more support out of the gate than any coach has here since maybe O'Leary.
Collins has done something amazing with our recruiting class and hats off to him for that. Now its time to see what he can do without the excuses. Johnson recruited to a system, with overworked coaches and a recruiting staff of 9 who also had other jobs for the majority of his time here. Collins has a General Manager, whose sole job is to scout new talent, a social media director and branding specialist, a recruiting staff, a staff of analysts and the benefit of the best excuse in the world for failing to perform.
On the UGA thing...
Oleary and gaily combined had the same amount of wins over the same amount of years. And in O'leary's case he had an offensive mastermind in friedgin running around alot with a heisman runner up at QB. Who knows if that would have been sustainable had o'leary stayed long enough to find out. Gailey of course never won.
But this is Georgia Tech lets do a little math.
Since Dodd we have had a .259 winning percentage against the dwags. It's a little worse if you go back to the last time dodd beat them as he lost the last 3 he played but for the sake of arguement using solely historical projection in 11 years we would be expected to win 2.85 games. Johnson won 3. However there was something rather historic about Johnsons wins compared to say O'leary's. They weren't in a cluster. Maybe you can count 14 and 16 in one but historically when coaches have had success against UGA its been in a cluster Oleary 3, ross 2, curry 2, carson 2. Pepper Rodgers was the only one other than johnson to win his first game against against uga. He is also the only coach to ever have his 2 wins staggered. So yeah Johnson was kind of historic. Just not in the way you intended the word.
