At 6-0, Georgia Tech has a clear path to the ACC championship game and potentially a spot in the College Football Playoff.
ATLANTA — There’s something endearingly nerdy about the Georgia Tech campus, where students in Rebel Alliance t-shirts discuss matters of engineering, science and technology, combing over tables of free books set up on a sidewalk beside the Ramblin’ Wreck. (Don’t laugh. There are likely at least a couple future billionaires, and maybe a boss or two of yours, amongst this crew.)
There’s also something pleasantly ironic about the fact that Tech’s most successful football season in more than a decade is led by a guy who, by his own admission, hasn’t been in a classroom in 25 years, and a quarterback whose solution to most problems is to simply throw his body at them. There’s also the fact that the man tasked with bringing the two diverse sides of Georgia Tech together has been on the job for less than three months, right in the midst of the most transformational period in college football history.
Still, somehow, it’s all working … and it’s a potential model for other donor-rich but athletically middling schools all over the country.
Georgia Tech boasts an impressive football history; the Yellow Jackets are the answer to one of the more famous bar-trivia questions around, claiming a 222-0 victory over Cumberland in 1916. Tech played in the SEC for 31 years, from its inception through 1963, and claims four national titles. But all of those came in the 20th century, the most recent of which was 1990. Since then, Georgia Tech has been a reliable but unspectacular member of the ACC, occasionally venturing into the top 25 but rarely threatening powers like Florida State, Miami and Clemson.
So when current Georgia Tech president Ángel Cabrera took office in 2019, he announced as one of his avowed missions a significant investment into the athletics program, with the intention of raising Tech sports to the level of Tech academics.
“Not many schools in the country do (both) at a high level, and those that do, I think, can continue to propel forward,” Ryan Alpert, the Jackets’ newly-minted athletic director, told Yahoo Sports this week. “Over the last three or four years, you've seen the advancement of the brand, you've seen investments into the program, being strategically aggressive in the way that it takes to build successful athletic departments.”
The results are becoming visible on the football field. Under third-year head coach Brent Key, a former Georgia Tech offensive lineman, the Yellow Jackets are 6-0, ranked 12th in the country, with a significant upset of Clemson already on their resume. Quarterback Haynes King is now a dark-horse Heisman candidate, and there’s a growing belief that there’s something special happening at Bobby Dodd Stadium.
“In the stadium on Saturday, you see that many people there and see the energy and the excitement,” Key says. “You don't have to see things or read things or go out. You can feel it. You can feel it. You know.”
Thanks to the massive size of the ACC, Tech doesn’t face Miami, SMU or Virginia on this year’s regular-season slate, meaning there’s now a clear path for the Jackets from here to the ACC championship, from there to the College Football Playoff, and from there to … well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet.
“Brent, Angel, and I are completely aligned. We want to invest at a high level, we want to compete for championships, and I think that starts in the ACC,” Alpert says. “As long as you have access to the postseason, then you can build your program. … You start with competing for that ACC championship, and providing your staff and program with the resources it takes to be there.”
Building off the field
Ah, “resources.” The watchword of the current college football landscape. Whatever resources you have are already spent and whatever incoming resources you have are already allocated. So now, whatever resources you can wring out of donors will be the difference between success and struggle.
And that’s where Tech is attempting to leverage its massive but underutilized alumni base in new ways — specifically by reminding Tech’s wealthy graduates and their corporations that there’s a football program that could use your help … and it could benefit the entire university if you do. The newly-legalized financial structure of college athletics opens up an entire new donor class for savvy universities; car dealers and hot tub salesmen may have been fine handing over duffel bags of cash in Waffle House parking lots, but high-profile alumni and corporations would rather write checks that are above the board and on the level.
“We have really successful donors, and [we need to make] the correlation that athletics can drive success for the institute,” Alpert says. “You hear a lot of programs talk about athletics as the front porch of any school, and I think at times, we've kind of been bifurcated. … We've been starting to track the metrics of how college football and how our athletic department can create visibility and engagement.”
Georgia Tech is already planning a $500 million capital campaign, entitled “Full Steam Ahead,” that’s designed to improve and enhance all elements of the Tech athletic experience — so long, Bobby Dodd Stadium aluminum bleachers. The athletic department also struck a 10-year apparel and NIL agreement earlier this month with Under Armour that, according to an ESPN report, is more than six times the average annual amount Tech currently receives from adidas.
Tech already has an agreement in place with AMB Sports & Entertainment, Falcons owner Arthur Blank’s corporation, to play one game a year at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, about a mile and a half from Bobby Dodd. Past opponents for that off-campus game have included Clemson, North Carolina and Notre Dame. But it’s this year’s opponent that’s raised a few eyebrows — on the day after Thanksgiving, Georgia Tech will play blood rival Georgia not on campus, but in a cavernous NFL stadium.
Alpert is sympathetic to the concerns about a loss of tradition, but he points to the payday — $10 million for a single game, five times the amount that a Georgia game typically generates — as a necessary financial decision in the context of the House settlement obligations that every college athletic department now faces.
“We wouldn't be where we are as a team without that game,” he says, “because they help inject some financial resources for us to be able to maximize revenue share.”
Building on the field
But all the projected income doesn’t matter if the program can’t put together wins on the field, and that’s where Key and King come in. To King, the maturity and camaraderie of the Tech locker room is visible and evident every game.
“The closer that you are with people, the more confidence that you build and the more trustful that you are, the team is going to find ways to win and find ways offensively to move the ball and defensively to get stops and special teams to execute,” King tells Yahoo Sports. “When everybody's working towards a common goal, you know, you tend to be dangerous.”
The Jackets know they have a challenge facing them every week, starting this weekend at Duke. Despite all of Tech’s success to this point, the Blue Devils are a 1.5-point favorite, and Key is just fine with that.
“You can’t let entitlement creep in,” Key says, “believing the past efforts are going to bring future rewards. Nothing in the past does anything to what we’re doing now.”
There’s challenge ahead for Georgia Tech, but there’s opportunity, too. Outside of Miami, no team has established itself as a clear playoff team in the ACC. Why not Tech this year? And, to Key’s mind, why not next year, and the year after that, too?
“I'm not interested in building a one-trick phony, right?” Key says. “I want to build a program that's sustainable for the long term. And then for the future, build a great foundation that can weather storms, can weather ups and downs, and good times, bad times. When you have a program that can do that, that truly has been built the right way.”
Category: General Sports
