Seventeen years later, it’s still the stuff of nightmares.
It wasn’t even supposed to be them. It was supposed to be Army, a road trip to West Point paired with the previous year’s game in Atlanta. But Army backed out at the last minute, leaving Tech with a hard-to-fill schedule void in October. At that point, the only real solution was to add a second FCS team to get to 12 games even though winning a second FCS game wouldn’t count toward bowl eligibility.
Hah. Winning. How naive we were to think it
could ever be that simple. We couldn’t have known at the time that Tech would have to overcome the worst quarterback in team history.
Back then, I wanted to believe that Calvin Booker did his best that day. He was a pocket-passing quarterback who had transferred in from Auburn a year earlier, and even though Paul Johnson’s arrival meant he had no shot to start as a senior in 2008, he stuck around and worked hard because that’s what good teammates do. And when the two QBs ahead of him went down with injuries, he stepped up and provided veteran leadership to keep the team afloat.
I let myself believe all of that because it made it easier to digest what it really was: the single worst quarterback performance that I have ever witnessed at any level of football.
That might seem like an exaggeration on paper. How could such a nightmare of a QB game involve a 79-yard touchdown pass? The answer is when the play in question was a dump-off to Jonathan Dwyer, who did all the work himself on what really should’ve counted as a run play for him. Booker completed two other passes on “[Judas Priest] it, Demaryius down there somewhere” throws, and he ended the day with this atrocity of a passing line:
Tech’s offense managed 10 points that day. They were shut out in the second half by an FCS team that finished the year 5-6. Aside from Dwyer’s long TD, Booker guided the offense to 120 yards on 57 plays in his only start for the Jackets. It was utterly unwatchable offensive football. And the 10 points was only enough because Derrick Morgan blocked a last-second field goal attempt that would have tied the game.
Things worked out in the short term, of course. Josh Nesbitt returned to the lineup soon afterward, and that Tech team finished 9-4 with a thrilling comeback win in Athens. They comfortably qualified for a bowl (strange that no records of that bowl game seem to exist, though…) and laid the foundation for the following year’s ACC title.
Calvin Booker was part of that ACC title story… as the one who did everything in his power to ruin it. He chose to spend his post-football days acting as an intermediary for an agent, a role in which he tried to provide (an utterly trivial amount of) impermissible benefits to Morgan Burnett and Demaryius Thomas—the violations that led the NCAA to pretend they had muscle by stripping Tech’s ACC title in the official record books. The uNC alum who served as the NCAA’s lead investigator may have done the procedural legwork, but Booker is the reason there was anything at all to investigate.
It’s a minor miracle that a loss to an FCS team isn’t on his list of anti-achievements for his alma mater. But those of us who were there have not forgotten.
Ultimately we are here to preview that FCS team, but not to throw shade in their direction. Gardner-Webb has been a middling FCS program for most of the 21st Century, but they recently broke through with conference titles and FCS playoff appearances in 2022 and 2023 before taking a step back last year. They opened this season with a big win over Western Carolina, and if history is any indication, this is not a team that Tech can ever take lightly. Alas, it won’t be too hard for Brent Key to motivate his team to play with ferocity against a team known as the Runnin’ Bulldogs, even if those other Bulldogs have a mascot that is probably not physically capable of running in any form.
Anyway, for a more lighthearted coda: the 2008 game against Gardner-Webb was the first college football game my parents had ever attended. Knowing next to nothing about the sport at large, they thought it had been an exciting battle between two evenly matched schools. I spent the car ride home explaining all the reasons why that was very much not the case, but… looking back, that level of harmless, blissful ignorance is something I can’t help but envy to this day.
