Georgia Tech has fired football coach Geoff Collins after a 1-3 start to the Yellow Jackets’ fourth season under his leadership.
Georgia Tech has fired football coach Geoff Collins after a 1-3 start to the Yellow Jackets’ fourth season under his leadership. According to 247Sports’ Bryce Koon and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Tech dismissed coach Geoff Collins on Sunday. Less than a day after a 27-10 road loss to UCF dropped the Yellow Jackets to 1-3 in Collins’ fourth season.
Collins’ record at GT dropped to 10-28 (7-19 ACC) after the defeat, and the program has made little progress under him.
Collins was hired from Temple and immediately had a challenging task. Changing Georgia Tech’s system away from the option-based strategy that former head coach Paul Johnson had implemented during his 11 years with the school.
Collins benefited from this, but his Jackets struggled severely at the start of the 2022 season and never finished higher than 10th in the ACC in total offense in any of his first three seasons.
Georgia Tech had a busy offseason in the transfer portal, losing many key players (including star running back Jahmyr Gibbs to Alabama) while adding several new faces to help strengthen the roster for a crucial year of growth under Collins’s leadership.
FBS
Georgia Tech has been outscored 110-20 in its three games against FBS opponents (Clemson, Ole Miss, UCF).
Since the Jackets are starting to look for a new head coach, they are debating whether or not to keep Todd Stansbury as athletic director.
It has been reported many times that the Georgia Tech Athletic Association has called a special meeting on Monday to debate Stansbury’s future and Collins’ buyout.
After the dismissal of Scott Frost at Nebraska and Herm Edwards at Arizona State, Collins becomes the third Power Five head coach to be let go in the first month of the 2022 season.
In their fifth year, both Frost and Edwards had already accomplished much in their respective fields.
A failed strategy
When Collins first arrived at Georgia Tech, he considered the loss of Atlanta-based prospects as the program’s most pressing problem.
He jazzed up the show by featuring Atlanta landmarks like the “404” area code and Waffle House. Thirty of the 53 recruits he signed were from the state of Georgia. Therefore, it was somewhat successful.
A sad reality is that not many of his athletes blossomed under his guidance. In 2021, only two players on the Yellow Jackets’ roster will be All-ACC selections.
Gibbs moved schools, and Quez Jackson completed his education and left. Tech is in the ACC’s bottom two in every major statistical category, including offense, defense, scoring, and even field goal kicking. Collins’s leadership has brought the program to a new low, despite his efforts to produce recruiting victories.
Is an investment coming?
Georgia Tech took a backseat in the recruiting race thanks largely to the Johnson option era. The lack of investment from the Jackets stands out much more in the rough and tumble Southeast.
According to Sportico, Georgia Tech spent $27.2 million on football-related costs in the 2019-2020 academic year.
That put them at #40 on the list of public schools, just ahead of Kansas State and #6 among the 8 public schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Comparatively, Georgia, a major opponent, spends $48.5 million annually on football.
During his four years at Georgia Tech, Collins could not turn his promising start into substantive success. Especially in this day and age, when every Power Five team outside of the Big Ten and SEC is existentially on the chopping board, the administration must decide what it wants its football program to be long-term and what it is willing to invest in the program to make it happen.
The coaching carousel keeps spinning.
Many wondered how the transfer portal and early signing period would affect the coaching cycle. After two years, the trip is going at a breakneck pace.
We’re only four weeks into the season, and three Power Five teams have already made adjustments. Coaches at LSU, USC, UConn, and Georgia Southern were all let go last year before October.
Remarkably, Georgia Southern and Texas Tech changed their coaching staffs before the completion of the season, hiring full-time external replacements.
Even though college football stars only have four years to make their mark, teams are increasingly giving up on seasons early. It will be fascinating to see if all this activity eventually leads to some safeguards to prevent the short college football careers of innumerable athletes.
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