That should be Geoff’s last game as head coach

lv20gt

Helluva Engineer
Messages
5,586
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? We ARE bad at spending money. What potential coach in the entire cosmos hasn’t figured that out already?

Sometimes. The bigger issue really isn't how we're spending it but how much we are spending.

The Hewitt deal was just a dumb decision any way you look at it.

Gregory was a cheap hire done bad. Very conservative choice that had no real reward or even potential to really succeed.
I'd argue Pastner was a cheap hire done well. The gamble was the issues he had at Memphis were more related to Memphis than him, and that the issues he had there wouldn't be issues here. I'd argue it's paid off even if Pastner isn't the long term guy to lead the program.

I'd argue Collins was somewhere in the middle. After the decision was made to go away from the option, there was at least the potential that increased recruiting could yield good results (and realistically we needed to improve recruiting whether we went away from the option or not), and the staff was put together in a way that made sense for that strategy (not just hiring Collins but also putting a staff together that should have been strong recruiters). What makes that hard to firmly nail down is what were the other options. Not just the money, but it's also likely that the prospect of having to deal with the fall out of going away from the option turned people off. Whether going that route was a bad decision or not largely depends on what the alternatives were. One of the reason Pastner's hire was smart in retrospect is that the alternatives that were talked about flamed at (Drew at Vandy and Capel at Pitt). We'll likely not know that.
 

Steverc

Jolly Good Fellow
Messages
336
Firing him at the end of the season will cost $10.5 million. If we fire him next year, it drop to $7.2 million. In 2024, it is $4.8 million. It seems that we are stuck with him until 2024.
 

lastoption

Georgia Tech Fan
Messages
62
You forgot to add “player development”. CPJ was pretty good at that, even with the increasing problems he faced with recruiting talent.

My biggest gripe about CGC is not his game day coaching, but the lack of player development that we’ve seen under his leadership.
Thank you for all of the interesting replies. I’m still really concerned for programs like GT that getting a good or even great upcoming coach isn’t going to move the needle enough to even remain in the world of being a perennial bowl team with the occasional lightning in a bottle 10+ win season. It’s one thing to talk about the money to buy someone out and pay a potentially really good coach. That seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the money necessary to hire a damn army of recruiting staff, elite pre-nfl training staff and NIL marketing staff (and I assume even more staff focused on recruiting out of the transfer portal now). I just fear that unless GT (and similar p5 schools) completely changed and dumped an order of magnitude of dollars into those aspects of the program it is going to be really hard to have aspersions of fielding a team that can be ranked on a reasonably consistent basis, no matter how good the coach is. I hope I’m wrong because I like GT and loved supporting the student athletes at GT but the economics seems really hard now.
 

Lavoisier

Ramblin' Wreck
Messages
847
I think it’s worth a risk shot. At least for a couple seasons. What are we scared of? Going 2-10 instead of 3-9? Worth a chance.

We should be scared of that. If we get another coach who only wins 10 games over a 4 year period we are absolutely done as a program. We’ll be looking for a coach again in 2026 except we’ll be 12 years removed from the 2014 team and the last time anyone thought of us as relevant and it will be so much harder to get back to any relevancy
 

brian22

Ramblin' Wreck
Messages
545
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Lavoisier

Ramblin' Wreck
Messages
847
The rumors are flying around, but I don't know who TheSteamWhistle is or their track record. Not disputing their sources because there's enough chatter that I believe it, but I would wait until someone else reports. The paysite guys and the AJC are probably the most plugged in people so I'd watch for Ken or Kelly before celebrating with some Waffle House.
 

slugboy

Moderator
Staff member
Messages
11,725
Thank you for all of the interesting replies. I’m still really concerned for programs like GT that getting a good or even great upcoming coach isn’t going to move the needle enough to even remain in the world of being a perennial bowl team with the occasional lightning in a bottle 10+ win season. It’s one thing to talk about the money to buy someone out and pay a potentially really good coach. That seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the money necessary to hire a damn army of recruiting staff, elite pre-nfl training staff and NIL marketing staff (and I assume even more staff focused on recruiting out of the transfer portal now). I just fear that unless GT (and similar p5 schools) completely changed and dumped an order of magnitude of dollars into those aspects of the program it is going to be really hard to have aspersions of fielding a team that can be ranked on a reasonably consistent basis, no matter how good the coach is. I hope I’m wrong because I like GT and loved supporting the student athletes at GT but the economics seems really hard now.
There are some programs that have done well for a while. App State has lost head coaches but the program keeps doing well. Coastal Carolina did well under Moglia and now under Chadwell.
We get fixated on the head coach and not on building a winning program. The head coach is part of that, but they're not all of it, and a program should outlast a head coach.
However, a bad head coach can do a lot of damage to a program.
 
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