Georgia Tech head coach Paul Johnson said his team has clearly dug itself a “pretty good hole,” and now they have to start digging their way out of it. The Yellow Jackets will begin that process on Saturday when they travel to Death Valley to take on No. 6 Clemson.
“And it’s not going to be easy this week,” Johnson said. “We’re probably playing the best team we’ve played all year, certainly defensively. They are always, year in and year out, very good.”
Unlike the Tigers (4-0, 1-0 ACC), who are riding a high after last week’s win over Notre Dame, the Yellow Jackets come to Clemson Memorial Stadium for the 3:30 p.m. kick riding a three-game losing streak. After scoring an ACC record 134 points in the first two games in wins over Alcorn State and Tulane, Georgia Tech has cooled off both offensively and defensively.
It all started with a trip to South Bend in which it was manhandled by the Irish, and then got whipped at Duke to open ACC play. Last week, the Jackets blew a 20-0 first quarter lead against North Carolina as the Tar Heels scored 38 points in the final three quarters.
“We’re disappointed with how we’ve played to this point,” Johnson said. “We’ve got a lot of guys who have been banged up and hurt and out, but we’re almost halfway through. You know, we’ve got to find a way to dig ourselves out against a really good team at a tough place to play.”
Georgia Tech (2-3, 0-2 ACC) was favored by the media who cover the ACC to win the Coastal Division, but a loss to the Tigers will all but end any chance it has getting back in the Coastal Division race.
“Well, we’ve just got to try to get better. We’re not good enough in any facet of the game to carry another facet,” Johnson said. “You know, in past years, like last year we were probably good enough offensively to carry the team. We’re not this year. And so we’ve got to get contributions from offense, defense and special teams, and we’d like to get them all in the same game.”
Dabo Swinney hopes that’s not the case this week.
“They have not played bad at all. They have played pretty solid,” the Clemson coach said. “They have had some turnovers and some different things that have been uncharacteristic of Georgia Tech, and we have to hope that they don’t put it together this week.”
The Yellow Jackets are struggling in a lot of areas. They do lead the ACC in scoring (41.4 ppg) and rushing offense (311.8 ypg) but a lot of that was piled up in those two wins came against lesser competition.
The offense has fumbled the ball five times in the last three games and the defense has allowed 30 or more points in each of those contests. The defense was supposed to be the Jackets strongest unit this year, but they rank 12th in the ACC in scoring defense (23.6 ppg), 12th in rushing defense (169.6 ypg) and ninth in total defense (333.8).
“Well, we’ve got to play better. I mean, that’s disappointing,” Johnson said. “We knew we had lost a bunch of guys offensively even before the year started, and then we lost a bunch more to injury, and we had eight starters coming back. We’ve got to play better. We played a really good half at Duke, and other than that, it’s not been up to expectations.”
To get out of the hole they have dug for themselves, Johnson says the only thing they can do is keep playing.
“We’ve got a lot of guys hurt, just like everybody else does. We’re on our sixth or seventh A-back. We have guys who are playing who probably when we started we didn’t think were even going to be on the travel squad,” he said. “Several freshmen, they’ve got to grow up. We’re in Game Six.
“We put ourselves here. We’ve had a chance in every game with a play here or a play there and there’s a very fine line between winning and losing. Nobody is riding in to save us, so we’ve got to save ourselves if we’re going to get it done. We’ve got to come out swinging.”