The mistake was not firing pellini, but hiring Riley.
Hard to believe we have fans more loyal to a man (one given an extraordinary length of time here) than to the school and the program.
Man makes millions, and if he headed the math dept he would have been long gone.
This post is
personally insulting to me.
Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to my posts here down through the years knows that I have always had the
long-term success of the program as my major goal. That's why I like Coach: he helps mitigate our recruiting disadvantages and he knows what he's doing. You, like many fonts here, are suffering from a variety of delusions about our situation. Let's go over them, shall we?
• "The offense cripples our recruiting! If we were running something else it would be a lot easier to get premier athletes to come to Tech!"
Well, to put it briefly, no. Since the NCAA put in the graduation progress rules and the 85 player limit and Tech continued to ramp up entrance requirements, the situation we had in the Ross/O'Leary years is gone. We are also an engineering school; it's like MIT was playing P5 football. A change in our offense - which, you'll notice, has worked pretty well - won't change the context of our recruiting one whit. And, I might add, the only thing that is fueling these concerns is a few critical injuries and academic/discipline problems. We lost several really good recruits (Custis, Leggett, Mills, Jordan, Johnson, Benson, Klock, A. Marshall, and several others) to those in recent years. Get half those players back and healthy and our recruiting would look a lot better. So would our record.
• "The Hill is the problem! If we only got an administration more interested in winning football, we'd be able to get better quickly!"
The Hill is concerned, as it should be, with the academic program of the school. The athletic programs are an inheritance that they tolerate because it helps with alumni relations. Some of them like going to the games, but most don't. Same with a lot of the students; they didn't come to Tech to watch football. Here I think we ought to be careful of what we ask for. If the drumbeat keeps up sooner or later the Hill will reply: "Ok, we're going to quit the ACC, join the AAC, play a much less demanding schedule (we should do that anyway), and win more! After all, you asked us to do that, right?"
• "If we changed the curriculum we could attract better players!"
As others have pointed out, the BOR won't go along with this and for very good reasons. Having a premier technical university in Georgia is an immense selling point for hi-tech businesses and a major incubator of new ones. And, of course, the faculty wouldn't take to this at all well. Most of them came to Tech
because of the curriculum and consider (I know some) the football program a costly distraction. Same with the Hill, of course.
What Coach does for us is the same thing he did for Navy: he gives us an avenue for overcoming many of these problems. That's why I was so enthusiastic about his coming to Tech and why I think he deserves support through this rough patch. We are just now getting around to doing things he has been calling for for years. We need to see what he can do with them.
I'm not sure why you've suddenly decided to simply ignore the actual situation of our football program the way you have been doing, but don't presume to think that I am some sort of Paul Johnson fan boy ever again.
