Great question.
You are posting on the wrong board. For some reason, not based on fact, a huge percentage on this board believe that Paul Johnson was great and left the program in great shape. The facts don't support that view, nor do the majority of posters on some other boards.
My grandma.
That’s exactly what I said. My question was wondering why that game? What was different about practice that week?
Oh, for someone to come run the program into the ground like that again… one can dream.
I'm not sure I'd qualify playing in 2 Orange Bowls, beating u[sic]ga 3 times, and going to the ACCCG 3 times while going to bowls most years as "running the program into the ground". I'd bet a lot of P5 teams would trade their 2008-2018 with us if they could.
CPJ gave us some great wins and great seasons. I credit him with rekindling my own flagging interest in GT football. That said, @jacketup has a point, despite overstating it. Hard to argue that CPJ left the roster better than he found it. Over his tenure, the perception of GT’s program changed, and not always for the better in the eyes of many recruits and fans. Personally, I loved that my team ran the “quirky” offense, but I can see how it was not good for the program in the long run.
Well, you’d think after 10-28 maybe she’d want a divorce, but in the words of Carla Bruni:
Would you rather have had Cutcliffe and gone to one ACCCG? Or whoever else was available and willing in 2008? CPJ kept us competitive and somewhat relevant in a time where athletics funding skyrocketed and we lagged behind. Our locker room was unchanged from like the 1980s until a few years ago. Do you think a different coach would have brought in dramatically more talent between 2008 and 2018? Would you say that our talent now is that much better than it was in 2019? The only reason we bottomed out was because of an incompetent HC. If we had gone with Norvell or Satterfield or somebody, they would have been able have us at least look like an average CFB team.
Whenever we rehash these arguments my biggest WHAT IF ever is what might have been if the administration had given more support to CPJ who needed much more money for recruiting staff, travel, and assistant coaches. I feel like we started getting more support after he left.
It’s a fact—the football support staff grew a lot when Collins took over, including recruiting staff. It’s something Johnson argued for his entire time here, and the money wasn’t allocated until he retired.
I sit in between these two opposing viewpoints of "CPJ running the program into the ground" and the "we were AWESOME and not struggling at all at any time during CPJs tenure." CPJ, a coach I admire (present tense, he's still alive and I still admire him), was excellent for our football program for a number of years. From 2008-2014 we only finished lower than 2nd in our division once, went to a bowl every year though our bowl record wasn't very good, beat UGA twice (note the time period, I know we beat them one more time), and only had a single season where we finished below 0.500. From 2015-2018 we were much more up and down and, for some, the writing was on the wall that the NCAA and college football in general was not fond of the offensive style CPJ and a few others ran and had begun enacting rules to make it much more difficult to have success. Four of the five seasons we had with 8+ wins were in the 2008-2014 time frame while two of CPJs worst seasons were in the 2015-2018 time frame. I recognize that one of those two bad seasons was significantly impacted by injuries but I think the magnitude of the collapse with those injuries highlights that while we weren't as bad at recruiting as some might think that we had a big problem with overall quality of depth. I do think our recruiting was also not as good as it needed to be for us to get consistently back to the 7+ win level, but that's just an opinion though our recruiting on the offensive and defensive lines was not great (not saying we didn't get a few excellent players here and there on the lines rather that we struggled to get enough high level talent especially on the lines). So things weren't amazing at the end of CPJs tenure here and at the same time the program wasn't a dumpster fire either (CGC, with an assist from ADTS, lit the dumpster fire).
You seem to have the impression that I regret the Johnson era. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was simply stating that as great as Johnson’s tenure at GT was, he was also, in my opinion, not good for the program in the long run. These things can both be true.
You are a distinct minority in your view that CPJ "ran our program into the ground".
