I'm pretty sure, after every loss since I have participated in gtswarm there have been calls for the coach's firing. It just seems to be the knee jerk response of choice to express frustration. There will come a day when CPJ is no longer at the helm of GT football. Personally, I am in no hurry to get there, but I will not bore you with the argument to keep him, purely in the interest of time. In any case, such discussions have a great deal more merit towards the end of seasons rather than beginnings.
With that said, I am a bit disappointed in how we have answered the bell to 2018 as a team. In fact, I did text a friend (who could not watch the game yesterday) that was the worst half of football I have seen from GT in a decade. It was a text written in emotion, but now that I have had time to think and settle down, I am still very hard pressed to recall a worse one. Maybe blowing the huge lead against Miami after scoring something like 35 unanswered points at one juncture to take control (TW's tenure) would surpass this one. It would be and interesting, if not painful, debate.
At this point, GT has been maddeningly mistake prone. That is the bottom line. We have some areas of weakness personnel-wise, but that has not been the major contributor to our situation. I no longer have a DVR (in favor of youtube tv), so watching replays has been very limited, especially in terms of slo-mo review etc. However, for much of what is happening, I don't really need it and neither do you. Glaring STs mistakes, indecisive QB play, RBs cutting the wrong way in the open field, failure to protect the football, poorly thrown passes, dropped simple passes, poor gap responsibility, poor tackling angles in secondary, failure to wrap up, and the list goes on and on.
I guess the point I want to make is this: despite the incredible holes we have dug for ourselves and the mistakes committed, we have done enough to be competitive in those games on the scoreboard. Many teams would lose by 30 (and do every week) under similar circumstances. USF and PITT are not as bad as many on this board would like you to believe. There might be as few as 5 teams in the country who could make the kind of mistakes we did against them and still win. We put up 600+ yds against USF and won the second half decisively against PITT.
The thing to remember is mistakes are correctable. Whether we fix them or not is the question. Clearly, we are not a top echelon team in CFB. However, if we can manage to clean things up, we can go on to a very successful season from here. There are signs everywhere that this is possible if you just look for them. Just close your eyes for a second and imagine the flow of the games that would have been, IF IF IF we had simply avoided the most glaring, inexcusable and easily correctable mistakes. No game is ever perfect and I am not talking about perfection anyway - just the simple glaring stuff.
To be truthful, I have taken much of what has been said by players in the off season with a grain of salt, especially the stuff about how simple things are and we just run and react more on defense now. Anybody who knows boo about football knows that the complexities of running an odd front defense far outweigh those of an even front, or at least potentially can. Well, we are seeing a fair amount of confusion out there for such a simple situation, aren't we? In my mind, this has been expected in the early going. Even 4 year veterans are rookies in this system so leadership isn't blessed with system knowledge as an ingredient. I really really like some of the stuff I see on defense and I can visualize it coming together at some point. We are just far from consistent at executing anything at this point.
