bke1984
Helluva Engineer
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- 3,290
9 wins is tough. Those aren’t incredible seasons but they are very good seasons. In my life we won 9 or more in 1985, 1990, 1998, 2000, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2014, and 2016. That’s 9 times in 40 years. We’ve only 8 or more there more times: 1991, 1999, 2001, 2011. So 12/40.I have been hard on a lot of the coaching decisions made in the two losses, but I will make a positive point about Key. Key may be a victim of his own early success. Let’s not forget how bad we were under Geoff. It’s a minor miracle Key got us back to .500 almost instantly(4-4 as interim). It’s probably a bigger rebuild to get us to 8-9 wins than we want to admit. We’re probably way ahead of schedule.
I don’t think we can expect to do that every year. The only two coaches at Tech who ever did that were Heisman and Dodd - and Dodd only did it for the middle part of his career.
I think that we should have been much better under Collins. We had the talent to win more games, but simply were a disorganized mess. Key fixed that immediately. I think his success in the second half of 2022 was a bigger deal than what has happened since. I believe Fritz or whoever else could have also quickly gotten us back to .500 after that. Now we’ve got to start beating our equals. We can beat teams better than us and worse than us. But when a team knows they’re in for a tough game and it’s an equal match we struggle. Gotta get over that hump.