GT VT Post Game

[GTBandit22]

Haven’t read most of the takes:

Defense has progressed a good bit. Challenged down the field. We are good linebacker play from being decent. Still lose contain too often, but most of the their hay was made by tricking us vs beating us. I think we are a few difference makers in the front 7 from being good. But tucci can coach.

I know people are down on Buster, but let me ask you; your OL is having trouble run blocking, your QB cannot hit a pass beyond a screen, oh yeah, he’s also the backup. What do you call? We had a double move that was wide open and he double clutched and took a sack. We missed a wide open comeback route by 10 yards over his head. We threw into dropping linebackers multiple times and had one picked. We had a nice play to a TE underneath and he got tackled by the turf,

. I thought we started pressing too late and should have yanked Pyron at half. This isn’t your 4 year starter, he’s the backup. When he’s off, you gotta try someone else. I think Philo being a freshman limits the playbook even more than the backup.

Honestly I felt like a Syracuse fan must have felt after our game vs them last year “man if we had a QB, we would wax these guys”.

Need to heal up during the bye week and get some weapons back. All I know is that this is when Tech usually plays their best, with their backs against the wall.

 

[Golden Tornadoes]

I’m sure special teams have been discussed ad nauseam, but I noticed something today that I would implore you to explore if you have the time. Henry Freer is a terrible long snapper. His snaps are slow and arched whereas VT’s long snapper was snapping them quick and direct. In fact, most of the games I watched today I saw the difference. It’s small sure, but we need every precious second we can get for Shanahan to get the ball away even though his punts leave a lot to be desired also. His punts leave our gunners on an island hoping to make a tackle when they really need hangtime and depth.

 

[gorcone]

We will end up 6 -5 and going bowling. Sort of good but could have been better.

 

[Sugar3ThousandPounds]

What a frustrating season this has morphed into. Last year’s O the second half of the season paired with this year’s D would be 7-2 minimum. (stubbing our toe at either Syracuse or Louisville would be understandable as would a loss vs ND. Today would’ve been a comfortable win.) All the tough schedule talk doesn’t hold much water imo either: none of the 7 P4 teams we’ve played have exceeded preseason expectations except for maybe Duke, and several are solidly to significantly worse than expected (FSU, Louisville, UNC for sure, Syracuse and VT could end up there depending on how the rest of the season goes). Sure ND, Miami, and uga are tough games, but no harder than your average SEC team’s 3 toughest games.

Just been an odd year. Even when King was healthy and putting up good #’s on paper, something still looked just a bit off with the offense. Hard to pinpoint what exactly, maybe just playcalling like a lot are saying. Here’s to hoping two Saturdays from now is finally the day where the O drops 35+ and we collectively go “THERE we go, that’s what we’ve been waiting on all year!”, but at this point not counting on it

 

[GaTech4ever]

I’m sure special teams have been discussed ad nauseam, but I noticed something today that I would implore you to explore if you have the time. Henry Freer is a terrible long snapper. His snaps are slow and arched whereas VT’s long snapper was snapping them quick and direct. In fact, most of the games I watched today I saw the difference. It’s small sure, but we need every precious second we can get for Shanahan to get the ball away even though his punts leave a lot to be desired also. His punts leave our gunners on an island hoping to make a tackle when they really need hangtime and depth.

Henry Freer has graded out as the worst player on GT’s special teams every season he’s played. I’m talking like 83/83, 75/75, etc. I guess we can’t try anyone else since he’s such a great story. Smh

 

[Bogey]

Simply we lack talented player depth. Nothing new for GT. Our #1 RB is clearly playing hurt. #s2-4 are all out. That leaves a true freshman who is the #5 RB as the other RB. You expect excellence from that! Nuts!

Couple that with backup QBs and presto our offense sucks!

We all well know you think our team sucks. Why must you keep repeating yourself. Does it give you pleasure?

 

[Bogey]

M ost of us went into this season thinking realistically that we were looking at 6-6 or 7-5 at best. Our starting QB gets dinged up early in the season and our passing game falls off a cliff. Plus our star RB also got dinged. Still we manage to get to 5-2 before our QB cannot play. We lose, as expected, to a much more talented ND team with our backup QB. unfortunately his performance level dropped against VT but our freshman came in and showed a lot of promise. So we now sit at 5-4 with a realistic chance of being 6-6 despite the challenges we have faced this season and with reason to believe King will be ready to play against Miami and a much better idea of what our offense should be playing our backup QB. Personally, I think with a bye week that our entire team desperately needs, and a healthy starting QB, we can play Miami a competitive game, possibly pull out a win in BDS, beat NCSU in a classic night game in BDS, and finish either 7-5 or 6-6, exactly where most of us expected preseason, despite our challenges we have faced this season.

 

[UgaBlows]

We pass protect really well, Faulkner needs to lean into that with Philo and go for broke against UM

 

[LongforDodd]

I'm willing to be wrong. It just feels like even the most mediocre QB can look decent behind a good OL. And I'm holding out hope Pyron is at least mediocre.

Really good point about the WR and the many inexplicable drops.

You’re not wrong. The OL is not performing and these games would look a lot different if they were, pass drops aside.

We walk a very thin line with our difference makers. We don’t have enough of them. Things are getting better with that but we’re still thin.

The OL needs to step it up.

The OL needs to step it up.

 

[Southern psu fan]

To reinforce your point and to counter @Dottie1145's some more, FEI ranked VT's offense #39 going into the game. That's decent and significantly above average in FBS. Their ranking will probably drop some due to the performance of our defense today. How anyone could have watched the game and then want to undermine our defensive performance is puzzling. I lost count of the number of 3-and-outs we held them to.
Plenty of other areas to critique about this game, but our defense did their best to keep us in it.

Defense player very good imo it’s just hard to beat teams that have a deeper roster with your starting QB not playing. Things just didn’t fall our way this year and it’s cost us a few wins but that’s football. I believe everything is good we just gotta get HK and #44 back healthy. Our starting QB at Penn St got hurt last night and didn’t play in the second half and we were losing at halftime but James Franklin has a loaded football team at least 2 deep at every position something Brent Key doesn’t have but it’s definitely coming. Give Brent Key the same roster Penn St has and you’ll see a lot of @$$ kicking even if a starter or 2 goes down. It’s frustrating losing so I get it.

 

[Richland County]

I hate to do this, but if CPJ had these players with on O with a D performance like that we win by 2-3 scores.

That’s not an elite defense. It’s good, but nowhere near elite. We made them look like the 85 Bears. They didn’t do anything all that special. No crazy pressure. No disguised coverage. Just basic cover 2/3/4 that we couldn’t execute against. When Philo came in it looked like we had no confidence in his ability to throw.

We played without our best offensive and best defensive players, but our staff gave us basically zero chance with our offensive game plan. We went from playing in a phone booth to playing in a hallway. By the time we figured that out and put Philo in it was too late.

Again if Paul is here Tech would not have any of these players. He isn't the coach anymore. He is partly responsible for the lack of talent when the new staff arrived. Give it a rest Mrs Johnson.

 

[Richland County]

The OG's are getting man handled. In fact the whole OL pretty much as a whole sucks. The OC is a guy i hope finds new home next year. His play calling is rec league. A offense has to establish something running or throwing. Busters play calling feels like a random draw at a bingo party on what plays he is going to call. F Buster he is a joke. He has zero feel for the game.

 

[Richland County]

Defense player very good imo it’s just hard to beat teams that have a deeper roster with your starting QB not playing. Things just didn’t fall our way this year and it’s cost us a few wins but that’s football. I believe everything is good we just gotta get HK and #44 back healthy. Our starting QB at Penn St got hurt last night and didn’t play in the second half and we were losing at halftime but James Franklin has a loaded football team at least 2 deep at every position something Brent Key doesn’t have but it’s definitely coming. Give Brent Key the same roster Penn St has and you’ll see a lot of @$$ kicking even if a starter or 2 goes down. It’s frustrating losing so I get it.

You are 100% correct all the talent Franklin has brought in and they still come up short every year. It isn't easy putting a contender on the field.

 

[Bogey]

Again if Paul is here Tech would not have any of these players. He isn't the coach anymore. He is partly responsible for the lack of talent when the new staff arrived. Give it a rest Mrs Johnson.

The game has moved on from CPJ's scheme with the changes in blocking rules. And the new offenses that teams are now running from the shotgun based on reads the QB makes after snap to choose his best option, similar to CPJ, but more diverse.

 

[Richland County]

The game has moved on from CPJ's scheme with the changes in blocking rules. And the new offenses that teams are now running from the shotgun based on reads the QB makes after snap to choose his best option, similar to CPJ, but more diverse.

You are correct. If Paul had been open minded about the Pistol he may have won big time.

 

[MWBATL]

The front 6/7 for VT are very good, and that showed today.

Too many GT fans trash our OL when we play a stout defense, ignoring the talent on the other side. Sometimes, the other team is simply better on the LOS. But that doesn’t mean we suck, sometimes it means they are quite good on that other team. Give our OL a break and stop being….unfair (most polite word I could come up with) to our OL players.

 

[iceeater1969]

Defense player very good imo it’s just hard to beat teams that have a deeper roster with your starting QB not playing. Things just didn’t fall our way this year and it’s cost us a few wins but that’s football. I believe everything is good we just gotta get HK and #44 back healthy. Our starting QB at Penn St got hurt last night and didn’t play in the second half and we were losing at halftime but James Franklin has a loaded football team at least 2 deep at every position something Brent Key doesn’t have but it’s definitely coming. Give Brent Key the same roster Penn St has and you’ll see a lot of @$$ kicking even if a starter or 2 goes down. It’s frustrating losing so I get it.

Why did DT #99 Jordan VDB leave PSU?
1. Was it because he didn't get PT? .
At gt 99 shares equal time with our best DT 88 who played way more snaps last year. With 99 there is no drop off at all. In fact, the hustle chase play is way better with 99. Last year our run defense was abysmal- we just stoned a good tough running team. With him here we are letting stud dt hit gaps and requires a quick help by other ol. 88 and he are bring disruptive and rest are swallowing up rb AT LOS. Funny how front 7 seems so much better.

 

[grandpa jacket]

I did not have only scoring 6 on my bingo card.

Once again, if Chris Cotter calls the play by play, we lose. Weird streak on the ACC Network.

I can’t get stats now, but I’ll see if I can pull up the five factors later.

Philo looked promising. We gotta make catches.

We have 1 touchdown in the last 8 quarters, plainly put we looked like the Gas House Gang. I am not optimistic

 

[bke1984]

Again if Paul is here Tech would not have any of these players. He isn't the coach anymore. He is partly responsible for the lack of talent when the new staff arrived. Give it a rest Mrs Johnson.

I don’t care about what the talent was 5 years ago. I’m simply saying that another staff would have won that game with those same guys. That’s problematic. What I see is an inability to capitalize on a team returning the bulk of its offensive production. And yeah, there are injuries, but they can’t figure out how to get the backups to contribute in meaningful ways - all guys they recruited that will be starters in the coming years.

Collins era aside, the offense yesterday was as bad as I can remember. 6 points in today’s style of football is horrible. And we got there trying to do stuff we know we’ve been struggling with. Key’s response - we just have to execute. **** man, sometimes you’ve got to step back and realize someone can’t do what you’re asking them to do and come up with an alternate strategy.

Overall - This play hard mantra is only enough to get us from dumpster fire to middle of the road. And why is everyone excited about doing something now that we should have been doing all along? We did it under three consecutive head coaches before the juice crew arrived, and then Key brings it back and the fan base becomes blind to the mass of bad football going on around it.

I get it - it’s year two. We likely just weren’t as good as advertised at the end of last year and just regressed to the mean. And we again have most of these guys back next year, so there’s a lot to look forward to. But man, they’d better figure out how to develop our 2’s because right now they aren’t good enough for us to win ball games.

 

[g0lftime]

We pass protect really well, Faulkner needs to lean into that with Philo and go for broke against UM

VT didn't blitz Philo as much as I would have expected. UM would likely challenge a freshman more than VT. Philo has the tools to be really good but he is a freshman. He is probably 18 or 19. HK is at least 23 and 5th year in college. What happens if HK comes back for another year? At least one of the backups leaves. Pyron must be fairly close to graduation. He can play somewhere next year or go to GT graduate school and compete again for the qb spot.