Pittsburgh Review - Georgia Southern Preview

This won't be much of a post.  The Pitt game was awful as I'm sure you know if you watched.  We actually played pretty well on offense.  Couldn't get a stop on defense.  Still had a great chance to win.  Didn't execute.

This weekend is similarly simple.  We are better and should win.  But Georgia Southern is not bad.  They beat Florida a few years ago, nearly beat us in 2014, and took UGA to overtime last year.  If we don't play well we could lose.  Hopefully, we know that, and we are ready.

But now we need to talk about Paul Johnson.  As I understand the contract terms, really no way we fire him this year.  Too much money.  But the buy out drops substantially next year.  He's 3-3, coming off of 3-9, and unfortunately, this year and last year is making 2014 look like an outlier.  Because now we have 4 mediocre or poor years out of the last 5.  Looking ahead, we have 3 games we should win (but could lose) and 3 games we should lose (but could win).  So you figure probably 6-6.  Win the bowl and maybe that is ok.  But if we don't execute and find ways to lose winnable games, 5-7 or worse could be real trouble.  At that point, I would think 2017 would need to be 10 wins or else Paul Johnson would be gone.  8-5 probably wouldn't save him in 2017 if he had been 3-9 and 5-7 the past two years.

Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe he'd be ok.  I still sort of want to keep him, because I love the offense and I think he's a good coach with a good system and fits in well at GT.  But at some point he has to get results.  His first four years were mostly good, his last 4 years mostly bad, and now in year 9, it is still bad.  I think college football fans are way too quick to see "trends".  One bad year (or sometimes even part of a year) and suddenly a coach or a team is "trending down".  But now, I'm ready to say it looks like coach is trending down.  Post 2009 there has been a little uptick in 2011 (that fizzled) and a big uptick in 2014.  And other than that, 4 years of pretty bad stuff (and teetering on a fifth year).

So, we'll see how the year finishes.  I think we can play with and possibly beat every team left on the schedule (except maybe VT, we'll see).  But we can easily lose to everyone left as well.  We haven't had the greatest track record in close games lately....

As always, Go Jackets!