Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
This one makes me a little sad too. The first bowl game I ever saw in person was the Citrus Bowl on January 1st, 1991 when Georgia Tech thumped Nebraska to win a share of the national championship.
This should not be. Atlanta, Georgia is a Top 10 metropolitan area in population. There is no way a Power program in a market that size should struggle to get eyeballs on it the way Georgia Tech does.
Yet it does. When they opened the season against Clemson (a team that travels well) in 2022, they tarped off the upper deck of the Mercedes-Benz Dome because they knew demand wouldn’t be high enough to fill the building. They actually had a smaller capacity that night than they would have had at Bobby Dodd Stadium.
I think the biggest problem this century for the Yellow Jackets was a decision to feature the triple-threat offense as a gimmick to try to be competitive. It completely backfired. It wasn’t Paul Johnson’s fault. He didn’t hire himself.
After a decade of an offense that rarely yielded overall success and was just flat-out boring, Tech tried to change its fortunes, but it hasn’t been easy. They have just fallen too far.
NEXT: Syracuse Orange