Opening statement
This beats the alternative. Dang. Look, you can look at all the stats and look at a lot of different things. I'll go through a couple of them here in a second. But at the end of the day, that was the first time this year we played as a football team. I thought we played as a complete team, played together. Offense, defense, special teams. The whole game, they were going back and forth on the sideline, encouraging each other, getting each other, "We got your back." That's what I've been waiting to see. That's Georgia Tech football. We got a lot of work to do in a lot of ways, guys. All right, but I thought we'd played closer to the standard that I have and that these guys have for themselves. We needed this.
I thought the stadium,
even for the pseudo weather that we had, I thought the fans were loud. The student section was awesome as always, really were a big part in it. You talk about the things we had to do and that were preventing us from winning football games. We talked about that for the last two weeks. Points per possession, efficiency. Didn't turn the ball over. We're 42% on got to have its third and fourth downs. We ran the ball officially, 6.1 to carry, and we're three for three red zone touchdowns. Discipline, we still got a ways to go. Like I said, there's a lot of things we got to work on still. But all in all, we played together. We played for each other. And I'm looking just at my notes pregame, halftime, and that's all we talked about was going out, locked arms, head down, right into the eye of the storm and playing for each other, moving as one, playing as one.
And I thought they did that. So again, it's good to get a win. We needed it and come in and get things corrected and be ready to get to work this next week.
What did you say to Alberto Mendoza prior to last drive?
We talked about the timeout usage, how we were going to use the timeouts with the time. I think it was, was it 2:40 when we started? 2:40. Told me we wanted to get two plays in. We were going to run the first play. All right, get another play in before the two-minute timeout. That way we can save three for under two. Then we got the couple plays down the field. Now we're sitting there without a minute like, oh boy. And we kind of played out the right way. Jordan got the ball down to the one. And then we had still, we called the sneak, knowing that if we didn't get it, we could still have plenty of time with the amount of plays we had and the amount of time left and trying to take all the time off the clock.
But going into this game, said it. I felt two very, very even football teams. Even though the records didn't show it, I felt like we were very even across the board in a lot of ways. Might have been better some than some, but it was going to even itself out and that's what you end up having as a four-quarter game.
On the play of Jordan Allen
Well, I think that was really, you get hit like that in the game of football. If you're just all playing independently, playing for yourself, you're probably not going to get back up on some of them. But when you know everyone's behind you, everyone's got your back, you got everyone's back, and you play together, that's why you talk about playing together. You're playing for each other. You're playing for something bigger than just yourself and your stats and your future and your brand. I challenged him. I said, we walk out on that field, it's out of yourself and into the team. And then we're able to do that and come away with the victory and be one another this week.
On bottling up Nate Sheppard
Well, that was the whole thing. We talked about setting edges, constricting cutback lanes, and then the pursuit and being more than one hat on the ball with him and wanted to make sure that he felt us. Held him to just under a hundred, I think it was 99 total. We weren't sticky enough on him in some of the coverage aspects when he was able to get out. He's a good football player. I was looking for him after the game. Didn't see him, but he's a really good football player. They do a good job utilizing him in a lot of different ways and all the defense did a good job at rallying to him.
And that was the key to the game. That was the key to the game was to be able to eliminate the big plays from him and keep him bottled up.
On Trelain Maddox
He's a captain. That's why he's a captain. That's why we named him captain. Love that dude. I said it's a spring ball. There is no one that epitomizes what it is to be a Georgia Tech football player, to be a Tech man more than Trelain Maddox. The adversity he's overcome and how apropos was it that he was the one that had some of the biggest plays today in the game. Talk about back against the wall, having adversity and fighting through the storm and coming out on the other side. It was very, very timely that he was the one that really led us.
This article originally appeared on Duke Wire: Everything Georgia Tech HC Brent Key said after beating Duke
