I believe Stansbury is under pressure and in jeopardy.
"Big Donors" is not one large homogenous body of like-minded people that act as one, it is made up of factions. There was a large enough faction that wanted the current football coach after 2018. But don't forget, there was a significant faction (there are more behind Garrett) that wanted the football coach gone last November after 9-25 and 100-0, and Stansbury refused publicly and staked his future on it. Stansbury himself denied that the money was not available to make a change after last season, it was his choice to keep him.
You must not forget The AJC Interview the week after the dwag game quoting Garrett and Zelnak:
“I think the fact that Todd has linked his career at Georgia Tech to Geoff’s success – and I think that’s really important to know that he did that – is a positive because certainly it indicates that the administration is all in with this working and willing to accept the consequences if it doesn’t,” Garrett said.
Garrett said he did see Stansbury’s further employment at Tech being contingent on the success of Collins’ own tenure.
“That’s certainly the way I see it,” Garrett said. “Didn’t he say, ‘I’ve got my man’? He’s got his man. He’s going to have to ride him.”
Stansbury chose to make his "I've got my man" statement publicly in the face of the faction that wanted change and alienated that faction, so essentially., "he bought that ticket, now he has to take the ride".
Binion over at FTRS wrote about change just yesterday.
The current pressure isn’t sustainable; it must decrease or be released
www.fromtherumbleseat.com
It's primarily about the coach but he also references failures at the top of GTAA (particularly Clem saying it was GTAA who closed off the upper deck seating for the game at MBS). He says he has "good information that several significant donors are withholding all contributions to the GTAA until the administration changes". Later says "If the on-field results go the way that our
numbers tell us they will, the pressure must be relieved by personnel changes that transform the top of the GTAA and the entire football program."
That's what you call "being in jeopardy". A 1-4 or 2-4 start might cost Stansbury in October (no $10.5 million buyout for his mid-season change), giving a new director the time to lay groundwork and start the back-channel coaching search, line up early December interviews, and choose. We'll learn in the next couple months which coalition of big donors has the critical mass if results continue to go south in the W-L record.