Just for the record, I'm not down on CGC at the moment. He faces some significant uphill challenges... many of the same kinds of challenges that faced CPJ.
Last night I was listening to Dean Legge on the "Dawg Post". The title of the podcast was: "Does Tech Matter to UGA Anymore?"
https://dawgpost.com/s/1988/riding-home-does-tech-matter-to-uga-anymore
Overall, I thought he was actually pretty fair in his assessment of the upcoming game and the Tech-UGA series in general, but he has a lot of misconceptions about us... some of the same misconceptions that the general public has (and we even have of ourselves). He says he grew up in Atlanta, and basically implies that that gives him special insight into Tech athletics. He goes on to say that Tech "needs to quit making excuses" for its mediocrity and step up to the plate. Tech is in the middle of one of the richest recruiting grounds in the country and we should be able to compete with UGA, Auburn and Florida for some of those players. He again says we need to quit making excuses because the Dukes and the Stanfords out there are great academic institutions and are not making the same excuses as Tech, that the whole "academic" argument is turning people off. He also goes on to say that "Tech has a larger endowment than Georgia" (I didn't know this), and that we should be able to use all that money to improve our athletics across the board. (He notes that we've also slipped in basketball and baseball, sports that don't require nearly as much funding). I wanted to address some of those points.
- If our endowment is indeed larger than UGA's, it really doesn't matter because we can't touch those funds. The athletic department is funded from donations, completely separate from the general endowment. (I think I'm correct here?)
- As far as recruiting, it's laughable at the moment to think we can really go up against the Auburns and the UGA's of the world, especially for linemen, where we're weak. We have had some great NFL talent at the Flats in the past, but still nowhere near the level of the factories. We can't bring in linemen who can't read. Period. Nor would we want to. The triple option turned off many recruits who dreamed of playing at the next level. However, there were still a lot of guys out there who knew they'd probably never make the NFL but still wanted to play college ball. At Tech they could get playing time and even be a star, whereas they may have been #3 on the depth chart at a place like Alabama. For many of these recruits, education was more important than football. Problems still persisted on the defensive side of the ball because we didn't have a special "gimmick" defense (if one even exists). Without our "gimmick" offense, we face the same recruiting challenges as everyone else.
- Although it's important to be able to recruit the Atlanta area and have relationships with Georgia high school coaches, Tech is a national (international) brand and should recruit nationally, like Notre Dame and Stanford do. In Dean's show, he says that "Tech is not cool" in the state of Georgia and "has never been cool" there. I've found that the further I travel from Georgia, the more respect people have of Tech. And usually it's about the academics, not athletics. But the brand name is out there and respected.
- Regarding academics, it's apples and oranges to compare Tech with Duke or Stanford. As said many times before, Tech offers far fewer majors, and not everyone wants to (or is capable of) going into a technical field. Here is a comparison of some notable schools:
Stanford University -
119 undergraduate majors
Duke University -
98 undergraduate majors
Vanderbilt University -
68 undergraduate majors
University of Virginina -
121 undergraduate majors
Virginia Polytechnic University -
150+ undergraduate majors
Georgia Institute of Technology - 37 undergraduate majors
Many of us understand that Tech is not a university, but an
institute. If we want to recruit players, there's a relatively narrow bandwidth of recruits Tech can go after, triple option or no triple option.
- How were we able to field good football teams in the past? At one time the culture was very different at the institute. The last time we had a President truly gung-ho for athletics (coupled with a reasonably competent AD) was with Patrick Crecine. He respected the history of Tech athletics and was a fan of sports in general. Tech succeeded despite the narrow range of undergraduate majors available. Since that time, each successive president (not sure about the current one) didn't care much for athletics. President Clough certainly didn't, nor did his successor. We've had a range of ADs who were either incompetent or didn't care. The attitude on the Hill was that Tech should be the MIT or Carnegie Mellon of the South, and athletics are merely an afterthought. In this kind of culture, members of the AD are hamstrung from the outset. The culture on the Hill has to change for anything to change on the field.
