Re the field goal

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Supersizethatorder-mutt said:
We have a kicker (Brenton King), who has been out with a groin injury. He will be back Saturday. He is supposedly as good as, if not better than, Bulovas, who committed to Tech and then flipped to Bama, where he is now a grey shirt, meaning he is not only no kicking, but is not currently even on scholarship. Hopefully King will live up to his billing.
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Bowlofass still has me shaking my head. Look at the Tennessee game, where he would have been a hero in front of a nationwide audience. Instead, someone else is kicking for Alabama and nobody knows who the hell he is.
 
RamblinCharger

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We say we don't have the scholarships to have 2 kickers, but I think that is BS. We should have recruited a good kicker Butker's Junior or Senior year, and redshirted the guy and he'd be a Redshirt Freshman/ RS Soph right now with plenty of practice time and could even kick a couple of easy FGs against FCS teams at the end of games. "Wasting" one more scholarship on a kicker for 1-2 years out of 4-5 would have won us the game Monday night. Also would be helpful if our starter ever went down for a few games. No we did not lose the game solely because of kicking, but we could have won it with kicking.
 

Sideways

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In a game like that we should not have got to the point where we are depending upon a walk on field goal kicker. There is plenty of blame to spread around but what is the point? It happened. Time to move on and get better. Incremental, weekly improvement in all phases of the game will take this team far. We have the quarterback, the Bback, the offensive line and the receivers playing at an unusually high level for this early in the season. Just get better at everything else and all the pieces for a successful season will fall into place and once again we will have the satisfaction of seeing fans of various football factories collectively scratching their heads and saying to one another "How do they (the Jackets) do it, with no 5 stars, no cheating, going to real classes (gasp!) I don't get it? " What's the world coming to?"
 

g0lftime

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C'mon guys we were 5 open scholarships to begin this season. A top kicker is a very important position for a) winning close games late and b) stopping run backs past the 35 yard line on kickoff. We lost the field position game Monday night mainly due to ST. We could have recruited a kicker a year ago that would be in the program as a red shirt freshman this year. While happy for the PWO's who got a scholly this fall what position could have won that game, not once but twice. As a golfer and knowing how mentally taxing a few bad shots can affect my game, I am afraid this past performance may have ruined his confidence this year. As a golfer CPJ knows this and probably why he had empathy for the kid.
 

Skeptic

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bke1984 said:
Oh I get it...he may turn out to be fine, but dude, the question is how do we come into a game so under prepared. You shouldn't just wait until the end of your kicker's career to fill the position. You should be recruiting and developing talent just like you do everywhere else so that when the kid graduates you've got someone waiting behind him that's ready to go. This happens every time we change kickers and it drives my crazy. I just don't understand why we treat this position different than every other position on the field?
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I think, but I do not know, that Johnson did not feel under prepared. and as I recall he was offering scholarships before Butker graduated. Perhaps someone will ask him or better yet tell him. Meanwhile, the kid missed. And that is why kickers are different, in a nutshell right there. A kicker misses a big field goal and the light gets more intense and the pressure and blame increase exponentially. Because right there in the hot lights is the villain, and he is hung out there all by his lonesome. The kicker, maybe 21, probably 18-19.

And you know what? Every single college football year kickers are recruited by "preparing coaches" who turn out to be busts. And the coach has spent a scholarship. Might happen to offensive tackles, but you have four or five of them. You're lucky to have two kickers. He missed. Might have been him, maybe somebody else. Pretty sure Johnson knows and will fix the problem. Except, you know: the next time a kicker lines it up after the best practice week of his life, he can miss. Sell a lot of scoreboards that way.
 

MWBATL

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Supersizethatorder-mutt said:
We have a kicker (Brenton King), who has been out with a groin injury. He will be back Saturday. He is supposedly as good as, if not better than, Bulovas, who committed to Tech and then flipped to Bama, where he is now a grey shirt, meaning he is not only no kicking, but is not currently even on scholarship. Hopefully King will live up to his billing.
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I sincerely hope King is back this weekend. It has been hard to get a handle on whether the other guy had the job against UT because of the injury to King, or because is not as good as advertised. I hope to see him this weekend, and hope he wasn't in last week because of the injury and not because of poor performances.
 
wreckrod

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My biggest thing is the kickoffs. The FGs, ok, those are tough, and there's multiple moving pieces.

But the kickoff? There are literally NO moving pieces. Heck I can kick the ball like that with my toe in my running shoes! Surely, surely we have tried letting Harvin do kickoffs? He can't be any worse. At least he's got a huge leg.
 
GTNavyNuke

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bke1984 said:
Oh I get it...he may turn out to be fine, but dude, the question is how do we come into a game so under prepared. You shouldn't just wait until the end of your kicker's career to fill the position. You should be recruiting and developing talent just like you do everywhere else so that when the kid graduates you've got someone waiting behind him that's ready to go. This happens every time we change kickers and it drives my crazy. I just don't understand why we treat this position different than every other position on the field?
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King was a blue chip player and one of the few in D1 football to get a scholarship guarantee. So I don't really blame CPJ at all for this as he took reasonable steps to cover Butker leaving. I agree that it drives me crazy since this seems to happen all the time that we go through a period of lousy FG and KO kicking. But to be positive, the punter (Harvin) is fabulous for when we fail to score.

Skeptic said:
Before we stand this kid against the wall, lighten up. There are so many moving parts to a FG or XP that some coach is going to have to break down the tape on both kicks and see who broke down and where, and how much blame rests with the kicker or holder and how much with the O line, or for that matter the snap. Butker missed a bunch, too, you know. We remember Georgia and a couple of others but if we check out his freshman and sophomore stats, and even his career stats of efforts over 40, we might be surprised. Beating Georgia washes a lot of sins away and blurs memories. He was a great kicker at the end but I recall similar queries about him and a "wasted" scholarship early on.
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I don't want to line him up against the wall. He was doing his best. As I said elsewhere "Georgia Tech; where doing your best isn't good enough since 1888.". It sounds really sarcastic, but it has a lot of truth. It's the way I feel when a project I'm working on as part of a team fails. Drilled into me by Ma Tech.

The question is how to respond if he is our best. My obvious answers are:
1) On KOs either attempt an on-sides kick or pooch kick all the time. Even kicking OOB is better than what we saw.
2) On FGs, screw it and go on 4th and 20 or less in scoring position where it isn't worth a punt. Otherwise let Harvin put it inside the 10.

There are options. Not good, but it is as it is.
 

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GTNavyNuke said:
King was a blue chip player and one of the few in D1 football to get a scholarship guarantee. So I don't really blame CPJ at all for this as he took reasonable steps to cover Butker leaving. I agree that it drives me crazy since this seems to happen all the time that we go through a period of lousy FG and KO kicking. But to be positive, the punter (Harvin) is fabulous for when we fail to score.



I don't want to line him up against the wall. He was doing his best. As I said elsewhere "Georgia Tech; where doing your best isn't good enough since 1888.". It sounds really sarcastic, but it has a lot of truth. It's the way I feel when a project I'm working on as part of a team fails. Drilled into me by Ma Tech.

The question is how to respond if he is our best. My obvious answers are:
1) On KOs either attempt an on-sides kick or pooch kick all the time. Even kicking OOB is better than what we saw.
2) On FGs, screw it and go on 4th and 20 or less in scoring position where it isn't worth a punt. Otherwise let Harvin put it inside the 10.

There are options. Not good, but it is as it is.
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I'm not ready to quit on FGs yet. As a famous NFL football player once told me after losing the first game, "One game does not a season make." They proceeded to lose another five before he admitted that made a season. It's a long story. Besides, isn't Paul Johnson back to coaching special teams after his experiment failed? Maybe he needs to fire his own self.
 

bke1984

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GTNavyNuke said:
King was a blue chip player and one of the few in D1 football to get a scholarship guarantee. So I don't really blame CPJ at all for this as he took reasonable steps to cover Butker leaving. I agree that it drives me crazy since this seems to happen all the time that we go through a period of lousy FG and KO kicking. But to be positive, the punter (Harvin) is fabulous for when we fail to score. .
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But you're missing the point. Reasonable steps would have been recruiting a kicker two years ago, not waiting until Butker was about to graduate. Would you ever let your star QB get to his SR year before going and recruiting a QB to replace him? Maybe if you have a kicker in the system for two years he is ready when the spotlight hits? Maybe he's not having to adjust to school at Georgia Tech when he gets called on for a huge moment.
 
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