HC Candidate/Rumors/Info Thread

[Randy Carson]

Here is my 2 cents on the current situation. I think writing is on the wall that Key is not the hire. I think McCollum leaving signaled that much. Does that mean the team has been told who the coach is.... if so it's a thousand percent Fritz after this weekend. If the team has been told it's not Key but not named a coach yet that doesn't make sense to me. If it's not Fritz then I think it will be a name we are completely surprised by. Lastly, I do find it interesting Batt passing over Key if option 1 and 2 did not work out. Seems like Key would have been safe for Batt on a number of levels. So for him to go a different direction tells me he really liked Fritz or whoever it is. Secondarily what about Key was such a turnoff???

No way 85+ keep that a secret.

 

[Techwood Relict]

But he's averaging only 5.8 wins a year at a school with a much easier schedule than Tech's.

I'm mitigation, he'd have better players at GT. I don't know what that means for outcomes, but Fritz can coach just fine.

 

[tomknight]

Not that I have seen. It looks like we might be the only school, other than Tulane itself, interested in him at the moment.

That doesn't mean he would be a bad hire, though.

I agree it wouldn't mean he isn't necessarily a bad offer. Just asking.

 

[Oldgoldandwhite]

I’m sure if the President and AD are reading this, they’re having a good chuckle.

 

[Papa Foxtrot]

I’m sure if the President and AD are reading this, they’re having a good chuckle.

If so, then they need to get their arses back to work!

 

[Ash]

Every day that there is no announcemnt means Key is not going to be retained.

 

[Techwood Relict]

if you need me to make stuff up for you to feel like you have the inside scoop, I can.

So enough with the teaser, whaddya got?

 

[rfjeff9]

Whike we wait, here's SOME good news....

 

[rfjeff9]

Every day that there is no announcemnt means Key is not going to be retained.

I think it's done at this point. Still if a deal isn't inked already and an announcement isn't made this weekend, Key still has a shot.

It isn't a given that other candidates will sign, so until then Key still isn't out, but he should probably be updating his resume.

 

[bobongo]

Every day that there is no announcemnt means Key is not going to be retained.

He's obviously not the first choice, but he could be on the back burner as a default choice. At this point, though, Brent might be looking around G-5 for HC openings.

 

[bigrabbit]

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities

Have you seen this? I know that the Tech people will cry about how the rankings are biased, but there is a little school that is ranked 49th and our Institute is ranked 44. I wonder how they do so well.

Also, there are better football schools ranked higher than us. The elitism that Tech people have are the reason why we aren't very good. Its also the reason why we don't have side-walk fans.

Ranking systems for national universities favor less specialized schools. GT is an upper tier 1 engineering/CS school, with a lower tier 1 business school and the (who knows how it’s ranked) Ivan Allen college. Ivan Allen is coming along, not trying to be disparaging about it, but that explains our net ranking as a national university. It’s not bias really, we are a tech school.

 

[Randy Carson]

What if we trade BKey and a future draft pick to Coastal for JChadwell?

 

[slugboy]

I think if Key was going to be hired it would have happened already.

Count me in as a Key-homer but Batt I think wants to hire someone new and fresh. He sees things from an AD view and a fan’s.

But if the best we can do is Willie Friggin Fritz then go ahead and dismiss us ever being relevant again. It would be the absolute dumbest thing but not surprising in the least. Making dumb decisions and being the smartest people in the room is what Tech does.

This isn't like a standard interview process because the timing is now so tight. Rumors are that we've made a couple of offers and there are rumors that we haven't. In a normal process, Batt and the hiring team would stack rank the candidates and offer the one at the top of the list. For various reasons, things may not work out. There are probably people on this board today who have had a great career but never knew that they were the third choice for the job that got them started. Or that they were the fifth choice for their big break.

There are three different places to be as a candidate: offered; blacklisted; waitlisted. If you're not blacklisted, you're not out of the game yet.

I've wondered that, too - if he's not considering Brent because he isn't "his guy". His job is to make the best hire fort Georgia Tech, not himself. But I think if he hires Brent, he should certainly get credit for doing so. Brent would become "his guy".

We're making a lot of guesses as to Batt's motivations and his internal thinking processes and his constraints.

I've seen managers that want to hire "their people". You can spot that really quickly, because they immediately hire their people. There's almost no interview process.

Hiring Chadwell or Willie Fritz or Riley or somebody that Batt doesn't have a tight personal relationship is not hiring "his guy". It's hiring an outsider. It's an unknown quantity for Batt. You do that for a few reasons--that person has a great reputation, you need skills that you don't have in your organization, or you've been directed to hire from outside, or you believe that the internal people are just not as good as people who work elsewhere.

If I were in Batt's shoes, my main talent is on the money side of the business, and I want to get back to that ASAP. What I would want in a Head Coach is (1) somebody I can sell to donors and fans and (2) someone who gets the job done, solves problems and doesn't create problems. That's it.

 

[Hjacket]

Sorry, I disagree. Students choose almost any of the schools you mentioned by a ratio of 3:1 or more except for Wake Forest. Tulane received a lot of its funding from the old United Fruit Company (the one that used to use the Marines to invade Latin American countries), and it has struggled for quite some time. I'm sure it's a fine school, but it's not even close to what it was.

Disclaimer: It used to have a great journalism school and I will admit that SOME schools are still very good. But overall, without continued endowment growth, it's being surpassed. (I did my graduate work at Emory and Tulane in no way compares to to Emory. Emory has so much money it's unfair.)

A lot of private universities are in trouble. For a private school, I’d want to see the enrollment over time and the endowment.
Tulane has nearly a $2B endowment and 14k students. Our endowment is about $2.7B and UGA’s approaches $1.5B. Emory has $11B

Tulane seems stable currently.

It's actually growing and prospering thanks to visionary leadership. It had a huge setback with Katrina and has been reinventing itself since.

 

[lv20gt]

So, IVY will respond with "yeah, but I hate Key" to anything you post. Sort of

Spot on paraphrase. My actual response was

No, I believe he is responsible for the OL that was terrible the past several years. Because he was the OL coach.

Kind of like how I don't give a pass to Collins for our defenses being horrible just because he had success as a DC at several stops prior. I also don't give a pass to Thacker or the assistants on past year's teams like people want to do.

I also don't give a pass to Patenaude or Long for the offense. Remarkably consistent in how coaches get blamed when what they are in charge of performs badly.

But I guess anyone not willing to just handwave away his poor performances as someone else's mistakes is just hating on Key.

It's not hate to point out he has no HC experience prior to this year that he has only one year of OC experience that was horrible or that his resume in general is not one of somebody that would get even a first look if there wasn't a personal connection.

It's not hate to not put little value into amorphous concepts like players loving him, playing hard for him, raising the energy etc etc.

Maybe it's not those that are against Key that have the irrational emotional response. Maybe it is those pushing hard for him on the grounds of him being a tech guy and loving the school.

 

[techfan#14]

If the team was told, the world would know by now.

The reality is, very few know, and even fewer will know much at all now that Fritz leaked. I'm certain GTAA knows who's been leaking info right now and they've probably plugged it in their own way. I'm almost certain info was "leaked" in the AD and HCF search to various people to see how sensitive information is handled by people who were trusted with that info. Cabrera would have been really good at the intelligence and spycraft business. If you remember the presser to announce AD Batt, he said something that passed by a lot of ears but raised my attention. He said (paraphasing) "J will report directly to me, and will be a member of my cabinet". A member of my cabinet. Given Cabrera's background, you can see that he's going to run GT like a high functioning international conglomerate. GTAA is just one unit of GT's overall business. I've heard Cabrera is an extremely nice and gracious person, but don't cross him...he's ruthless. Just look at how Stansbury and Collins were dispatched. Batt understands the seat he's in.

All of it is to say, GTAA is under MUCH better leadership, and brighter days are definitely ahead...and not just for the football program. It's messy at the moment, and there's a lot of people used to the old ways that will be in for a shock, but as the saying goes "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

So you believe the team does not know who the new coach is? If that is the case then I would assume Key is in the running still. What then prompted McCollum to throw his name in the portal.

 

[Techwood Relict]

What then prompted McCollum to throw his name in the portal.

I'll go with the uncertainty of it all. And probably Key not getting the job, right away, but he still might....

Ah hell, think I'll throw my hat in the Swarm transfer portal. I'm as uncertain as McCollum is.

 

[wesgt123]

Making dumb decisions is why GTAA is going through a sea change right now. Cabrera is trying to rid GTAA of all the cronyism and bad decisions that have led us here. Unfortunately, Key is stuck in the middle of it...just bad timing for him while tectonic shifts in GTAA are happening.

True. But I have little faith we get out of it.

I’ve exhausted all optimism I think at this point lol I’ll need to see us consistently not suck to think otherwise.

Ready or not, we’re about to enter *the biggest transition in all of college football*

 

[whitegoldsphinx]

So you believe the team does not know who the new coach is? If that is the case then I would assume Key is in the running still. What then prompted McCollum to throw his name in the portal.

Likely enticed by NIL $$$$$. I have no proof of that.

 

[tomknight]

Spot on paraphrase. My actual response was



But I guess anyone not willing to just handwave away his poor performances as someone else's mistakes is just hating on Key.

It's not hate to point out he has no HC experience prior to this year that he has only one year of OC experience that was horrible or that his resume in general is not one of somebody that would get even a first look if there wasn't a personal connection.

It's not hate to not put little value into amorphous concepts like players loving him, playing hard for him, raising the energy etc etc.

Maybe it's not those that are against Key that have the irrational emotional response. Maybe it is those pushing hard for him on the grounds of him being a tech guy and loving the school.

you crap on him with every post that you mention him. it's obvious, which is fine. others have their own agendas as well.