Coaches at Georgia Tech who cared about perception Bill Curry, Bill Lewis, Chan Gailey and Geoff Collins.
Coaches at Tech that did not really care about media perception Bobby Ross, George O’ Leary, Paul Johnson.
Last coach to really court the media was Pepper Rogers. He started well ended ok actually. Eventually his style grated on the money guys and he was complaining about facilities vocally. He got shafted some in my opinion. Geoff reminds me a lot of what Pepper tried to do which was make Tech the cool place to come play.
There is a pattern here. Read into it what you may. As an engineer I am a data driven guy.
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I think you're taking one aspect of their style and lumping them incorrectly. Correlation and causation and all that. I've heard a lot of the older fans say that Bobby Dodd was big on making his program fun and his players loved him for it. He was a true players coach. Does this mean that Geoff Collins can be accurately lumped in with Bobby Dodd because of the fun factor? Will he be as successful?
Putting that aside, I think times have changed. Could it not be argued that media perception is more important now than ever? Paul Johnson condemned the media in his Minnesota post-game press conference saying he was never treated poorly by the local media at any gig except GT. He said he never turned down an interview, but the constant criticism of him, his offense, and his program was horrible from the start. That negative recruiting on its own hampered his efforts. We haven't been a ranked team since week 3 of 2015 and you can attribute some of that to the unfair poor perception the voting groups had of GT under Johnson. Recruits would be blown away on their visits to campus because they had no idea GT wasn't as bad as we were painted to be.
I think part of CPJ's decline was he was used to a time before social media when you could tune out everything off the field and be successful. He wasn't interested in trying to make viral content to increase exposure, and I don't blame him. It can be kind of silly and feels "cheap," but I think it's definitely valuable. Collins is the complete opposite and uses social media as a tool and tries to pump out as much positive press as possible. I can't count the number of times I've seen recruits, former players, and local/national media say that "something special is going on at GT" these last few months. That has persisted through the losses and the belief is still ingrained. Perception is important these days and in recruiting it can mean a big difference with grabbing a player's attention. Perception is what allows nearly every SEC school to bring in Top 30 classes no matter how they perform in the season. Through social media you can essentially build your own perception these days and it'll pay dividends over time.
