Why Geoff Collins's Georgia Tech Rebuild Starts With a Rebrand

Augusta_Jacket

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I also keep coming back to what Dabo did at Clemson. He has slowly put together a football dynasty but he first changed the culture with his over the top enthusiasm. He got buy-in from fans and administration that allowed him to concentrate on recruiting.

Dabo is an excellent coach, and he deserves a LOT of the credit, but Clemson finally turned the corner by throwing money into their program hand over fist. Between DRad and Dabo, they've convinced donors top pony up for the highest paid staff of assistants in the NCAA. Their assistants were paid $6,810,000.00 in base salary last year by the school, before bonuses and other income. By way of comparison, Bamas assistants netted $6,233,723.00 and uga paid their assistant/parole officers $6,420,000.00. Tech, on the other hand, spent $2,813,072.00 on assistant coaches. Now some of that is indeed offset by the lack of an OC the last decade, but even adding the $700 k barely brings us to half what these programs are spending. If you read the article I posted earlier in this link, that's how Stanford got good. They spent the money to hire and retain quality assistants for Harbaugh. We can change the "culture" all we want, but if our new "culture" isn't bankrolled, it will go nowhere fast.
 

H-Wade

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Dabo is an excellent coach, and he deserves a LOT of the credit, but Clemson finally turned the corner by throwing money into their program hand over fist. Between DRad and Dabo, they've convinced donors top pony up for the highest paid staff of assistants in the NCAA. Their assistants were paid $6,810,000.00 in base salary last year by the school, before bonuses and other income. By way of comparison, Bamas assistants netted $6,233,723.00 and uga paid their assistant/parole officers $6,420,000.00. Tech, on the other hand, spent $2,813,072.00 on assistant coaches. Now some of that is indeed offset by the lack of an OC the last decade, but even adding the $700 k barely brings us to half what these programs are spending. If you read the article I posted earlier in this link, that's how Stanford got good. They spent the money to hire and retain quality assistants for Harbaugh. We can change the "culture" all we want, but if our new "culture" isn't bankrolled, it will go nowhere fast.

You don't have to have Bama/UGA/Clemson money in order to change the culture and have more consistent success then we've had recently.
 

iceeater1969

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People have short memories. The last two years were blah. The next two might have been good and that would have become the new narrative.

Right now little has been accomplished. The focus is on new possibilities. In two years we will have a new narrative one way or the other.
Agree.
Can't wait for signing day for the "yea that's better but it's not results on the field to start
Dabo is an excellent coach, and he deserves a LOT of the credit, but Clemson finally turned the corner by throwing money into their program hand over fist. Between DRad and Dabo, they've convinced donors top pony up for the highest paid staff of assistants in the NCAA. Their assistants were paid $6,810,000.00 in base salary last year by the school, before bonuses and other income. By way of comparison, Bamas assistants netted $6,233,723.00 and uga paid their assistant/parole officers $6,420,000.00. Tech, on the other hand, spent $2,813,072.00 on assistant coaches. Now some of that is indeed offset by the lack of an OC the last decade, but even adding the $700 k barely brings us to half what these programs are spending. If you read the article I posted earlier in this link, that's how Stanford got good. They spent the money to hire and retain quality assistants for Harbaugh. We can change the "culture" all we want, but if our new "culture" isn't bankrolled, it will go nowhere fast.

We are not Bama or Clemson.
We are not going there.

So we won 14 acc games in 4 years.
All he has to do is match that to be going in the same ACC direction. Heck no - I am on record of requiring that we have 2 additional wins and a clear path to better results.

By 4 years the top 10 p5 teams will have escalated $ so much the 11-50 pt teams will revolt. As cgc says I want us in the top 50.

We currently have recruiting class ranked 11 th in acc. By year 3 let's hype and play our way into beating 1/2 (6) acc teams lets out recruiting 2/3 (8) of the 12 acc teams. Then let's be competitive w all but the super power 5 teams.
 

Augusta_Jacket

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You don't have to have Bama/UGA/Clemson money in order to change the culture and have more consistent success then we've had recently.

That's a very shortsighted view. Since 1995, GTs winning percentage has been .594. This starts with O'Leary and goes through CPJ. GOL had a roughly .630 win %, with CPJ & CCG each in the .590 neighborhood. In comparison, Dodd won at a .690+ clip for his career. When he retired, our program became a losing program for almost 3 decades. From 1967 to 1994, GT had a winning % of .466%, even with the Ross years thrown in. If you look at the shift, it began with Ross closing out the lost decades before bolting for a better paying job. We suffered through a few more years before GOL had us once again with a winning record. He had one great year and a couple of CPJ like years where we probably should have won a couple more games considering the QBs we had in place. As soon as a better job came along, he bolted for more money. CCG and CPJ had similar long term results with vast differences in the year to year, but in the end, the dissatisfaction with our program isn't going to fix itself with a new coach, unless we give that coach the tools he needs to compete. Otherwise, in 4-6 years we will be sitting here having this same conversation about changing culture and brand so we can magically compete with our neighboring factories. Or, CCG will be wildly successful and the bigger factories will come poaching our staff, and maybe even CCG himself. You eliminate that by paying your staff well.

Now, you are correct that we don't have to have "Bama/UGA/Clemson" money to change the culture, but if wr want that culture to be about winning the biggest games on the biggest stages, then we need to be in the same zip code. Right now we're not even in the same state.
 

H-Wade

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That's a very shortsighted view. Since 1995, GTs winning percentage has been .594. This starts with O'Leary and goes through CPJ. GOL had a roughly .630 win %, with CPJ & CCG each in the .590 neighborhood. In comparison, Dodd won at a .690+ clip for his career. When he retired, our program became a losing program for almost 3 decades. From 1967 to 1994, GT had a winning % of .466%, even with the Ross years thrown in. If you look at the shift, it began with Ross closing out the lost decades before bolting for a better paying job. We suffered through a few more years before GOL had us once again with a winning record. He had one great year and a couple of CPJ like years where we probably should have won a couple more games considering the QBs we had in place. As soon as a better job came along, he bolted for more money. CCG and CPJ had similar long term results with vast differences in the year to year, but in the end, the dissatisfaction with our program isn't going to fix itself with a new coach, unless we give that coach the tools he needs to compete. Otherwise, in 4-6 years we will be sitting here having this same conversation about changing culture and brand so we can magically compete with our neighboring factories. Or, CCG will be wildly successful and the bigger factories will come poaching our staff, and maybe even CCG himself. You eliminate that by paying your staff well.

Now, you are correct that we don't have to have "Bama/UGA/Clemson" money to change the culture, but if wr want that culture to be about winning the biggest games on the biggest stages, then we need to be in the same zip code. Right now we're not even in the same state.

I see what you're saying, but I don't think it's realistic for us to ever come close to those programs money-wise so there's no point in wasting our time complaining about how we can't compete with their resources.

If we are succesful enough during CGC's tenure that he gets poached by one of those programs I think most of us would be happy with that because it means we've been more successful then the past few seasons. And whoever takes over from him will already be in a better position than CGC was when he took over (assuming that if he gets poached we have had multiple 10+ win seasons).
 

Augusta_Jacket

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I see what you're saying, but I don't think it's realistic for us to ever come close to those programs money-wise so there's no point in wasting our time complaining about how we can't compete with their resources.

If we are succesful enough during CGC's tenure that he gets poached by one of those programs I think most of us would be happy with that because it means we've been more successful then the past few seasons. And whoever takes over from him will already be in a better position than CGC was when he took over (assuming that if he gets poached we have had multiple 10+ win seasons).

Why cant we? Stanford outstrips them all. If we're saying we can't compete financially, then we're saying that we need to settle for less than the best. The term bandied about here is "settling for mediocrity." Since we will play between 3-5 teams that spend this kind of money each year, are you stating that we need to be happy if 8-9 win seasons become the new norm, instead of the previous 7-8?

And while we might be thrilled that CGC was poached for success, it puts us right back into the same spot we are in now. Rebuilding and rebranding and building yet another new culture.

I want GT to be a destination school. I don't think it's unreasonable to start building that Stanford style endowment. I'm tired of us spending less on football than 13 of the 14 full time ACC teams. If we're not going to settle for mediocrity in the W-L record, then we need to quit settling for mediocrity in how we approach financing our team.
 

H-Wade

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Why cant we? Stanford outstrips them all. If we're saying we can't compete financially, then we're saying that we need to settle for less than the best. The term bandied about here is "settling for mediocrity." Since we will play between 3-5 teams that spend this kind of money each year, are you stating that we need to be happy if 8-9 win seasons become the new norm, instead of the previous 7-8?

And while we might be thrilled that CGC was poached for success, it puts us right back into the same spot we are in now. Rebuilding and rebranding and building yet another new culture.

I want GT to be a destination school. I don't think it's unreasonable to start building that Stanford style endowment. I'm tired of us spending less on football than 13 of the 14 full time ACC teams. If we're not going to settle for mediocrity in the W-L record, then we need to quit settling for mediocrity in how we approach financing our team.

I was just thinking of the fanbase size and the type of fans that support those teams compared to ours. That's why I don't think we will ever be at that level, our fanbase will never be that size and our fans will never be as rabid. I won't be happy with only 8-9 win seasons, like I said in the prior post I would be happy with 10+ wins. But I'm just trying to be realistic and don't think it's possible to get on the same level money-wise as Bama and UGA but if we can get to the middle of the pack (at least) instead of 13th in the ACC I think that could make a huge difference.

Stanford is a special case, it sounds like their school is much more open to the idea of using their money for athletics whereas we like to keep most of our donations for the academic side so we can't really compare ourselves to them. But if that changes and we can start an endowment like they have, I agree that should be the model we go after.
 
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