I did that a few years ago and this is what I saw. It was probably the worst execution of the diamond I have ever seen. Plays took forever to develop and lots of guys missed their assignments. What saved it was that Duke's defense played terribly. It looked for all the world like they had prepared for the "other" offense and kept expecting Tech to slip back into it on every play. After that game I said to myself that Tech was not going to get away with that again.
Of course, later Vad took a hard hit (was it UNC?) and essentially never wanted to run the option after that. So we were stuck with 2 offenses that weren't working well.
Of course it wasn't the most flawlessly run diamond. It was our first game doing it. Hell go back and watch the first year under Johnson and see how "well" we ran our base offense. And that was practicing only that offense while the diamond was likely secondary to practicing our base stuff. Obviously any significant change we would likely see isn't going to be that smooth a transition.
Either way the point was that AFTER the duke game was rarely ran it. Had Johnson had any real desire to adapt his offense he wouldn't have effectively abandoned the formation after that game. Dropping it that hard after a win, and one where the diamond, ran well or not, was effective, tells the story there.
And yeah, UNC was a nasty hit against Lee. It was by no means the only one he took though. Lee got hit more often that year than any other QB I can remember.
