January 12, 2002

Maybe it started with the passing of another fine man, Smylie Gebhart, who died the last week of November and was buried on the day of the Tech-FSU game. Smylie was of my generation, and I remember him vividly from his Tech days in the late 60s and early 70s, swooping in from his defensive end position and winning All-American honors in 1971. He was a teammate of "Deep Snap" Charlie Cheney, who occasionally posts on the Hive, and the two of them played on teams that were good enough to go to two bowl games (and beat Georgia twice)

Smylie was cursed with much more than his rightful share of pain and bad luck. He was paralyzed from the neck down in 1979 because of a ruptured disk and spent the last 22 years of his life in a wheelchair before finally dying of cancer in his native Mississippi.

The words from Housman's poem, "To an athlete dying young," seem especially fitting in this instance:

"Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town."

God speed, Smylie, and rest in peace. You deserved much better.

As I look back at the way Tech's season unfolded, my depression turns to anger. I never did think that the Jackets would be good enough to go to the Rose Bowl, but I'll always believe that the talent was there to gain a slot in a BCS bowl. Tech could have - should have - been playing in the Orange Bowl against Florida. The blame for their failure to reach that objective can be laid squarely at the feet of the beer-bellied, gin-blossomed, blame-shirking, resume-enhancing George O'Leary.

O'Leary, who has never failed to duck responsibility for his shortcomings as a coach, tried throughout October and November to peddle the line that Tech's troubles stemmed from the postponement of the Sept. 15 game against FSU. What a steaming pile of bullcrap. Tech's problems actually started Sept. 29, when an overconfident coaching staff and team let the game against less-talented Clemson get away from them. It was on that same day that Notre Dame lost to Texas A&M to drop to 0-3, and reports started appearing in sports pages across the nation that Bob Davie was going to be fired. I think it's beyond dispute that after Sept. 29, O'Leary's attention turned away from his job as Tech's head coach and towards how he could nail down that soon-to-be-open position at Notre Dame. His thoughts and energies, in my opinion, were focused not on having Tech prepared and motivated for its next game, but on how he could maneuver and finagle his way into the Notre Dame coaching job. In simpler terms, he took his eye off the ball.

I won't crucify O'Leary for embellishing his resume, but I do blame him for not doing the job he was being paid $1.2 million a year to do. This could have been a very special year for Tech and its fans - a BCS bowl slot, a fourth consecutive victory over Georgia, and the team's best shot ever at beating FSU in Tallahassee (even factoring in the delay in the game being played). All that went down the crapper because O'Leary was more interested in pursuing a job he wanted than in performing a job he already had. It isn't a coincidence that from Sept. 29 to the end of the season, Tech's record under O'Leary was 4-5. O'Leary's the one who did not live up to his responsibilities as Georgia Tech's head coach. He's the one who let down the people who supported him and wanted him to succeed. He's the one who harmed the careers of several assistant coaches by acting like an arrogant prick. And yet, he had the gall to flip off the fans and alums who ultimately paid his salary by calling them "asses" and "flappers."But no matter. O'Leary is gone and I suspect he will never set foot on Georgia Tech's campus again. That suits me fine.

1. I think Tech did, especially when you compare what happened at the University of Florida when Steve Spurrier departed. Dave Braine took his time and found a coach with a good (though admittedly not great) record at the collegiate and professional level. Jeremy Foley panicked after his first two choices turned him down and hired someone with much less impressive credentials than Chan Gailey - for a job considered one of the most attractive in college football.

   Braine truly hit the jackpot - he got rid of an enormous pain in the neck without having to pay millions of dollars in a severance package and replaced him with someone who, in the long run, will probably be a much more productive head coach. On the other hand, I think that two years from now, Foley and Ron Zook will both be signing up for unemployment benefits at the state labor department's local office in Gainesville.

   Gailey may or may not be able to improve upon the Tech program's current level of achievement, but I'm impressed with a couple of things he did after he was hired: he retained Bill O'Brien as offensive coordinator and he said he was going to focus his attention on defense and special teams. That tells me he's perceptive enough to recognize that Tech's offense is in good shape and doesn't need fixing - and he's smart enough to devote his energies to the things that really need to be revamped. It also appears that even with Gailey's decision to finish out the season in Miami, Tech will be able to hang on to most of the players who have already committed and bring in a decent recruiting class. That is all very encouraging.

1. A lot of explanations have been offered for Tech's startling upset over the Cardinal, but the strangest one undoubtedly came from sportswriter Brad Weinstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote this Freudian analysis: "The Cardinal seem to prevail in Seattle only when Willingham has a golf club in his hand or offensive lineman Greg Schindler has meat in his mouth. . . ." Where is Flaggot when you really need him?

   Strange but true: there was Mac McWhorter on the sidelines of the Seattle Bowl actually encouraging players who had messed up to go back out and do it right. No glare, no stare, just a little positive motivation. There was also another sight not seen in a long time: Sean Gregory actually getting to run the ball. Mac and Sean were both vindicated, I think, by the final score.

   Watching Bill O'Brien call a wide-open game against Stanford, I almost got the feeling he was channeling for Ralph Friedgen - which may explain the presence of that large woman on the Tech sidelines who looked suspiciously like Madame Cleo. I liked the way O'Brien put Andy Hall in the game at select moments to run the option and keep Stanford's defense off-balance. If O'Brien had been able to use Hall like that during the regular season, George Godsey might not have gotten beat up so much and Tech might have been a little more productive in the red zone. We'll never know.

   More than anything else, Tech's victory in Seattle showed that you don't have to be a bully to get the maximum performance out of your assistant coaches and players.

1. O'Leary says that really wasn't his fault - he had his pen in position to put the right information on his resume, but it didn't execute.

   While it's not ethical to falsify your resume, it's also a bit harsh to lose a job because of incorrect information that really has no bearing on your qualifications (is O'Leary any less of a coach because he didn't actually win a letter at New Hampshire?). If you apply the same standard Notre Dame used to other situations, then Terry Bowden should be fired from his announcing job at ABC because he claims to be a "football coach" on his resume, and Mickey Andrews should be fired from his job at FSU because he claims to be a "human being."

   It's hard for me to understand why everybody was getting so riled up. Look at Mark Richt over in Athens - his resume says he's a "devoted Christian" when he's actually a "devout Satanist," and those five kids he claims to have adopted are really working in a Guatemalan sweatshop he owns with Kathie Lee Gifford. But you don't see Georgia's athletic department getting upset about that. Let's try to keep things in perspective.

1. I don't know about the coaching staff, but my sources tell me that Gailey has definitely decided to retain Wayne Clough as president.

1. For those who fret about whether Christians are "tough enough," just remember that the Christian soldiers who journeyed to the Holy Land for the Crusades beheaded so many Arabs that the streets of Jerusalem literally ran ankle-deep in blood. Remember also that during the Inquisition, it was Christians who burned, tortured and killed those wretched souls they perceived to be heretics. Closer to home, Bobby Bowden constantly professes his belief in an almighty God but still employs a defensive coordinator who exhorts his players to maim and injure opposing players, even to the point of twisting legs in pileups. Bobby has also compiled a fairly good won-lost record. Worry not about Chan Gailey's devotion to Christianity - I think the mental toughness will be there.

1. That's an interesting hypothesis, but you're forgetting that Florida still has Georgia on the schedule next season, so that shoots a big hole in your theory.

1. Indeed I can, and I say, Hail to Georgia as the drought breaker. Boston College had lost 21 straight games to ranked teams before spanking the mutts in the Music City Bowl. As Gamecock fans will remember, South Carolina had lost 18 straight games to SEC opponents before they whipped the chihuahuas in Columbia last year. Maybe Duke should try to schedule Georgia for next season.

1. What about him? Like most sportswriters I have known, Mark Bradley is a cheerleader for his own favorite teams and a lazy, brown-nosing jerkoff. He has fallen deeply and madly in love with Georgia's head coaches over the years and gives them big wet kisses in print every chance he gets. His nose is stuck so far up the rear-ends of Georgia's coaches that I'm surprised he can still breathe. He reminds me of a ninth-grade girl who has a crush on the captain of the football team, the way he gets all weak-kneed and trembling every time he talks about Tubby or Mark or Jim or Vince or anyone else who's ever been associated with the Georgia athletic program. Anybody else would be embarrassed to be caught performing such circle-jerks in his sports columns, but not Mark.

   At the same time, Bradley has never bothered to disguise his hatred of Bobby Cremins and anyone else associated with the Georgia Tech athletic program. It's not hard to figure out why - Bradley is a lot like the typical University of Georgia fan. Like most Georgia fans, Bradley can't stand it that Georgia Tech plays by the rules and doesn't get put on probation. It really eats at his craw that even with all the cheating Georgia has done, they still got slammed three years in a row by Tech's football team. And it must drive him absolutely berserk that a team of nobodies coached by Paul Hewitt defeated Kentucky (Bradley's alma mater) and Tubby Smith (Bradley's all-time favorite coach) in basketball last season. That is the unforgivable sin, in Bradley's eyes, and for that he will make Tech pay. He waited for a chance to pile on and take cheap shots against the Tech program, and he did it with gusto the weekend of the Georgia game. Nothing new there. He's never missed an opportunity to slam Tech and suck up to Georgia, so why should that weekend have been any different?

   It's instructive to note that Bradley has been stuck in the same job at a second-rate newspaper for more than 17 years. If he were really any good, a quality newspaper or magazine would have hired him away by now. Instead, he's a mediocre columnist for a lousy newspaper that fewer and fewer people are reading, and he knows it. In his frustration at being trapped in a dead-end career, he tries desperately to get attention by lashing out at a program that does things the right way, with class. Who cares what Mark Bradley thinks? He is beneath contempt, in my opinion. I wouldn't waste any time venting at him.

1. Time will tell, although I can't see what they've gained from the change in head coaches. Mark Richt had the identical record this year that Jim Donnan did last year, and he didn't even win his bowl game - but somehow, Georgia fans have convinced themselves that the program is on the sure path to glory. They also talk about what an offensive genius their coach is, but it looks to me like Richt's brain still goes into vapor-lock during crucial periods of big games. If there's a mutt fan out there who truly thinks Richt made the right calls and did a good job of clock management against South Carolina, Auburn and Boston College, then I want him to call my brother the real estate agent - he's got some ocean-front property in Afghanistan he's trying to unload. Georgia fans think they've got the next Bobby Bowden at head coach. They may find out they've got the next Tommy West.

1. I defer to the wisdom of Tech's sports information office on this one. In the media guide, they list both "Yellow Jackets" and "Rambling Wreck" as the official nicknames of Georgia Tech's football team, so it appears that you and your colleague are both correct.