George O leary.... recruited when the school was still mostly georgia based students with a larger student body that actually liked football. Comparing the recruiting in 1998 to now is ridiculous.
Degree Options are a severe limitations in the age of twitter and instant access negative recruiting.
When I was at Tech in the 70's, I always heard the school was about 51/49 GA/ROW. I heard they kept it as just above 50% Ga to keep the politicians happy. Now, target admissions are 60% GA/30% non residents/10% international--check the website. So I don't know what you mean when you say "when the school was still mostly georgia based students". It still is, and seemingly more so.
When I was at Tech there was no Ivan Allen Liberal Arts college. Now, Tech has 10 liberal arts majors. The only math class that has calculus in the title for these majors is a one semester course called Survey of Calculus. These majors are no harder than you would find at UVA, Duke, or even UNC--all of which are in our conference and rated academically higher than us. And we lost to 2 out of 3 of those schools last year.
In 1990 about half of the 2 deep was from more than 300 miles from campus. It's a smaller percentage now. We are fishing in a smaller pond now. I don't know why, but I do know that people should not complain about getting quality athletes when we aren't casting as wide of a net as we used to.
It seems like some Tech fans would rather have the academic excuse than win football games.
Johnson came here with no experience at the P5 level and brought with him a bunch of assistants and ex-players from Navy who had no experience recruiting at a P5 level generally or in the southeast specifically.
Andy McCollum is able to recruit. He didn't come from Navy. If we had 6 or 7 Andy McCollums and ran an offense that kids want to play in, our recruiting would be vastly better. If Johnson would place a priority on hiring assistants who can recruit we might not be looking at our 6th non-winning season vs FBS in most recent 9 seasons. Instead, he keeps the same crew around. He is loyal to coaches and players and offensive schemes, but that stubbornness is about to cost him his job.
George O'Leary and Chan Gailey had NFL experience that was attractive to kids. What does Johnson have that is attractive to them? Yelling at them?