The Tailgate: Georgia Tech

When the Atlantic Coast Conference changed its scheduling format prior to last season, commissioner Jim Phillips' primary explanation honed on how it enabled conference opponents to play each other more frequently. The former format was, at one time, a requirement to host a conference championship game, and the split induced by Boston College's 2005 addition built different reputations for both the Atlantic Division and its "Coastal Chaos" brethren, but the annual rite of passage felt like a team chasing down either Florida State or Clemson before a wildcard emerged from the other side.

It almost always ended with the same result, to which eradicating that idea abolished constant scheduling that produced annual outcomes. The two-division format once guaranteed six games against the same teams with one permanent crossover, leaving six teams to rotate through one game on a less-than-frequent basis. The new format kept three permanent rivals, but moving to a single-league allowed teams to rotate freely through each other's schedule with the idea of playing home-and-homes against every opponent over a four-year span.

At Boston College, the effects of the schedule change meant Florida State remained on the schedule as a former Atlantic Division foe, but the majority of games instead drew matchups against former Coastal Division opponents that never really found their way to Chestnut Hill over the years. A game against Virginia kicked off October, for example, and the new, permanent rivals brought Pittsburgh and Miami, two former Big East foes, back into a more regular turn on the schedule.

Nearly everything lined up perfectly for a new, fresh, exciting trip through the ACC, but in an ironic twist, a game this weekend against Georgia Tech fell somewhere in between the old and the new. A Coastal Division opponent, the Yellow Jackets are taking their third spin against the Eagles over Jeff Hafley's four years as head coach thanks to the quirky timing of three separate league formats.

"[Georgia Tech head coach] Brent Key has been there," said Hafley during this week's appearance on BC's official podcast. "He's been a big part of the offense. He's an offensive line guy, so you can see [his presence] in the running game. You can see it formationally in the style of play. He's done a great job with the offensive line, and I went back and watched all of the games that we played against them [over the past four years]."

Georgia Tech is an unlikely common opponent for Hafley's head coaching regime, but Saturday marks the second time BC is heading to Atlanta in the three years following the Yellow Jackets' 2020 trip to an empty Alumni Stadium during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to that game, it had been four years between matchups and another four years dating back to the last game played in Boston in 2012.

They somehow managed to play each other in a home-and-home in 2007 and 2008, but the three games in Hafley's first four years are more than any other coach faced Georgia Tech in BC program history. The Yellow Jackets are furthermore the only team to appear on BC's schedule three different times without some kind of permanent status, and while Key is the new head coach, he's also the second head coach to face Hafley after the program dismissed Geoff Collins during last season.

Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it means everything. Maybe it's just a fun stat. But when BC heads to Atlanta this weekend, it's worth noting that the fluid nature of college sports can't stop matchups from popping up every now and then.

Here's what to watch for when BC head to Atlanta:

****
Game Storylines (Mitch Hedberg Edition)

Rice is great if you're really hungry and you want to eat 2,000 of something.

People still recognize Georgia Tech for Paul Johnson's triple option legacy, but new head coach Brent Key has a team that's now completely transitioned away from the program's embedded run-first mentality. Offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner once ran the offense at Southern Mississippi to the tune of 3,500 yards passing in 2019 before he moved to Georgia as an offensive quality control analyst for the two-time national champions. He switched allegiances from Athens to Atlanta this year, and his scheme re-energized quarterback Haynes King in the first half of the season after he transferred from Texas A&M.

"[King] is really athletic," said Jeff Hafley. "He moves a lot better, and when you really start to watch the tape, he can run and keep things alive. He obviously did it at the end of the Miami game, and he can throw the ball down the field. Even with only playing six games because they had a bye week like us, he's still one of the leading passers in the country. He can hit the explosive [play], and he's got the ability to hurt you with his legs."

King's splits are impressive, but his 1,631 yards and 16 touchdowns to six interceptions further break down into numbers that illustrate how he dissects opposing defenses. He's completing 79 percent of his first quarter passes with four touchdowns and one pick, and his 439 yards in the fourth quarter don't include the 92 yards he's gained on the ground in that frame alone. He's been a better runner after halftime, and he's been especially balanced at home, where his 64 percent completion percentage translates to 11 touchdowns and three picks because of a 48-13 blowout win over South Carolina State.

"They love to attack you on the perimeter," Hafley said. "It's very obvious, and if you look at the quarterback hit charts and his percentages, he is so accurate in those short, intermediate passes. Whether it's the swings to get the ball on the perimeters or the screens outside of the wide receivers, every time they hit a screen, they'll have an end go off of it, which is what they then rely on first and second down with to try and hit you over the top. It's well coached, and it all looks the same."

The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.

Stopping Georgia Tech won't require perfection out of the Boston College game plan, but the Eagles need to continue building on their in-game performance. What started in the second half against Florida State is now hard-wired into the program's fabric on the defensive side of the ball, but having the bye week required Hafley and the coaches to assess how they wanted to push forward without reinventing the wheel.

"You could go and want to put all this new stuff in," said the coach, "but then you realize you don't have time to practice it all. I think the key for us offensively was that we had a week to really look at the pass game with Thomas [Castellanos] and what he does well and doesn't do well. There are some new things in the pass game that we really wanted to get to, but we didn't have time, so we kind of threw out some of the old pass game [to] focus more stuff where he's comfortable."

An extra week to practice and analyze tendencies allowed the unit to mold itself around the quarterback in ways that didn't exist in the first half of the season when the position wasn't totally secure. That doesn't necessarily mean that Castellanos was playing for his job after the first week, but a scheme initially built around Emmett Morehead or a Morehead-Castellanos hybrid didn't make sense when Castellanos was a completely different quarterback than Morehead.

But at the same time, that didn't mean BC used its bye week to reinvent the wheel. Castellanos might be the undisputed starting quarterback right now, but that doesn't mean the full, total package could completely eliminate the plays designed for a different quarterback. In some ways, the offense had to remain in place as it was constituted at the beginning of the season while transitioning to a place where the new, full-time starter could flourish with his own decision-making and likes and dislikes.

I remixed a remix once. Now it's back to normal.

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out against Georgia Tech because the Yellow Jackets have one of college football's stingier pass defenses. The rushing defense, on the other hand, is sixth-worst in the entire bowl subdivision with over 214 yards allowed per game, so BC's utilization and execution of its offense is going to fall under a bit of a microscope on Saturday afternoon considering the run game rediscovered its mojo after struggling to produce much of anything last season.

"If you poll the majority of coaches, they go back and self-scout everything," Hafley said, "but we self-scout ourselves every week. We'll go into a game with a third down game plan that we'll have on the board and what we've been in the last three or four games to see what other teams are looking at, and we'll change some tendencies because you can't not pay attention to that. Plus you want to see what you're doing well and what you're not doing well, so we self-scout all year round. And when you get to the bye week, it's not that big of a task."

BC's running game is vastly improved from last season, but there's no one particular area that deserves more credit than another because the Eagles have consistently pulled the right rabbit out of the right hat for the right opponent. A healthy Kye Robichaux might fare better than Patrick Garwo on a particular down and distance, but Alex Broome's ability to get outside or swing out of the backfield for a passing route offers changes of pace. Quarterback Thomas Castellanos can run the football for intermediate yardage, but improving his arm and accuracy is a way to bait a defense with his legs before opening the downfield routes.

It's hard to judge how that approach impacts BC's plan for Georgia Tech. It's entirely possible for the Eagles to slam gap scheme after gap scheme at the teeth of the Yellow Jackets' defensive front, but is that really the proper way to get the run game going against a defense that ranks so poorly? Is there a way to exploit a perceived mismatch to get those numbers expanded, and is there a delta within where Georgia Tech should be versus where the Yellow Jackets actually play?

These are all the questions bubbling to the forefront on Saturday, and it goes much deeper than simply running the ball behind a horsepower offensive line.

*****
Question Box

How will BC deploy its defensive backfield against Georgia Tech's pass catching weapons?

Georgia Tech has three to four different wide receivers capable of making plays against a defense, and Haynes King is very clearly a thrower capable of hitting those receivers. Eric Singleton Jr. has the most receiving yards with 355 yards on 20 catches, but Malik Rutherford is a possession-based receiver who opens opportunities for Singleton to go deep. Both can take tops off the defense, and Dominick Blaylock and Christian Leary pair for third and fourth options with Jamal Haynes coming out of the backfield.

To that end, spread offenses require an extra defensive back to play in coverage, and that means BC has to counter Tech with either an extra slot corner or rover-type safety. Linebackers have to remain active in the zone scheme, but there's a chance that the front four will need to stand up and get after the quarterback without much help at the point of attack because players have to shade further back.

Why does it feel like Georgia Tech is so overlooked?

I made this observation this week, but I don't feel like anybody really talks about Georgia Tech within the ACC conversation. That's a crying shame because the Yellow Jackets are still a major factor within the conference despite the three-win seasons from the past few years. The 2021 team smoked a nationally-ranked North Carolina team at Mercedes-Benz Stadium and were 3-3 before losing the last six games of the season, and last year's team bumped off both Pitt and UNC when they were in the national rankings.

This program went 5-7 last year despite holding one of the hardest schedules in college football. It played two non-conference games against the SEC and traveled to the Bounce House to play a road game against Central Florida. The season ended with North Carolina and Georgia, and that team couldn't have done more to clinch a bowl berth besides maybe flipping the 16-9 loss to Virginia.

The single league ACC allows teams to hunt for a potential conference championship slot even after one or two losses, so Saturday is a sneaky big game for Georgia Tech's postseason chances. The Yellow Jackets are 2-1 in league play after beating Miami, and there's a direct path to the conference championship game in the second half of the season. Next week's game against North Carolina could be a huge battle if BC can't leave Atlanta with a win, and four of the final six games are in Atlanta, including that end-of-season battle against Georgia.

Bottom line: this is a huge stretch of football for Georgia Tech, and I'm sounding an alarm to outsiders that the Yellow Jackets could really instigate some fun conversation over the last month.

Bigger game this weekend: Minnesota-North Dakota or Denver-Boston College?

This is a huge weekend in college hockey. No. 1 Minnesota is at No. 5 North Dakota to renew one of the oldest on-ice rivalries, and No. 6 Boston University is at Notre Dame for a series that feels like an early-season, must-win situation. No. 7 Michigan and No. 13 Ohio State have a pair of games in Ann Arbor.

The real treat, though, is on Saturday night when No. 3 Boston College hosts No. 2 Denver for the right to potentially claim the No. 1 overall ranking. It's about as big as it gets in non-conference play, even though both teams have to survive Friday challenges from Rensselaer and Providence.

*****
Meteorology 101

Here we are, talking about a weekend washout…again.

I'm a notoriously cranky person about the weather, but I'm really starting to get tired of planning indoor activities for the weekend. It's been awful to sit at my desk and look at the sunshine blasting outside my window during the week when I know Saturday morning is going to bring clouds, overcast skies, raw wind, and a stinging rain that makes any kind of outdoor work impossible. My kids start to get stir crazy in the afternoon, and I've flat out run the gamut of ideas with the same toys. I'm pretty sure we're probably going to just watch six hours of Bluey or something.

The wet weather in Massachusetts is irrelevant to the forecasted sunshine of Atlanta, but knowing I'll watch the television for 75 degrees and sunshine is about as bad as it gets when I won't have an enjoyable opportunity to watch the game outside while my kids play in the yard. There won't be sunglasses or playgrounds, and fresh air is only coming through open windows until the wind blows the water onto my computer (this is a thing that happened last month).

Anyways, it's going to be gorgeous for the game being played in Georgia. Not so much back home.

*****
BC-Georgia Tech X Factor

Third Down Defense

There was a time this year when Boston College struggled to get off the field on third down and opposing offenses pushed their success close to 50 percent. An inability to hold Northern Illinois outright cost the Eagles in the opening game of the season, and despite a marked step forward against Florida State, the team entered Virginia with a 46.6 percent defensive conversion rate on the situational down. Things were bleak, but the last two games held the Cavaliers and Army's shotgun-option to a combined 6-for-22 that dropped the overall percentage down to a manageable 40 percent.

The Eagles are still only 79th in the nation on third down defense, but numbers can be funny like that. BC's defense is also 35.9 percent at home versus 47.8 percent on the road, but the large bulk of that number is impacted by a dominant performance against the Seminoles and a statistical struggle against Louisville. It's an overall performance, and it fails to account for the upward trend that's developed over the last month.

"You want to try to start fast," Jeff Hafley said, "and be consistent for 60 minutes. I think that's what every coach in the country is trying to do right now, and certainly, we are [as well]. There are certain things we're trying to do to start faster…We have to be more consistent, and that's something we talked about a lot during the bye."

Georgia Tech possesses one of the best third down offenses in the nation, and the 45 percent success rate is nearly double what the Yellow Jackets accomplished last season. It remained remarkably consistent throughout the first half of this year and was exceptional against Ole Miss and Wake Forest, and the only real downturn occurred when Bowling Green went 10-for-17 against Tech's 2-for-8. The resulting possession numbers left Georgia Tech with 17 minutes of offense and a delta of negative-25 in favor of the 42 minutes of Falcon offense, but even with a bit of struggle against Miami last week, that represents more of an anomaly than a trend.

BC's style is trending more towards controlling the clock through a combination of stingy defense and possession offense with a dash of field-tilting special teams, but that's essentially the way through Georgia Tech.

*****
Around College Football

It's nearly impossible to predict big weeks in college football because so many different factors contribute to a team's overall performance, but I'd be lying if I didn't circle this Saturday as a week teeming with massive potential and postseason implications. There were too many wild card matchups that I couldn't ignore, and I really felt like the sports scriptwriters would deliver a huge week after giving me a couple of weeks to lull past that rush of big games in early September.

Nearly every matchup carries a major storyline at its surface level, and it starts right away at noon when No. 7 Penn State visits the Horseshoe to play No. 3 Ohio State. That game kicks off opposite Central Florida's only Big 12 trip to Oklahoma and the Commander-in-Chief's Trophy series game between No. 22 Air Force and Navy, which, for what it's worth, is at sea level in Annapolis.

Combine that with Tennessee's trip to Alabama, which feels like an elimination game for the SEC's championship game race and Minnesota's trip to Iowa in the afternoon, and we're all of a sudden staring down the barrel of a number of games that could change the face of major conference races even before we throw South Carolina-Missouri and Texas-Houston into the mix.

All of those games carry the schedule straight into primetime, but the Ole Miss-Auburn game kicks off opposite Michigan-Michigan State, Utah-USC and Duke-Florida State. By the time the late night rolls around, Arizona State is at Washington and UCLA is at Stanford.

On the ACC front, Duke-FSU is obviously the big fish here since the Blue Devils are up to No. 16 nationally and the Seminoles are currently fighting for a potential playoff spot, but every single game within the conference holds some type of nuclear fallout in the single-division standings. Pittsburgh-Wake Forest, the ACC Championship Game from two years ago, is all of a sudden a battle for teams fighting for bowl eligibility, and North Carolina is looming for the inside track to the conference championship game with this week's game against Virginia.

Even Clemson-Miami is between two teams that we thought might see each other in the league's championship game, but a loss on either side all but ends their shot at "second place with help."

Needless to say, it appears I'll be spending ample time with football in the background.

PS - if I needed any more motivation to make Saturday a full-fledged, all-day affair, Everton heads across Stanley Park to Anfield to play Liverpool in the Merseyside Derby. The fact that I'm amped up for that only means that my beloved Toffees are going to lose by three.

*****
Dan's Non-Sports Observation of the Week

I don't know if it's because of the rain, but we had an unusual number of spiders invade our house this month. I'm pretty sure they were flushed out of the ground, but we found them in and around the windows and ceilings in the aftermath of the drenching rains' flash flood conditions. At one point, I felt like I was John Rambo in the third movie when he set a record for most number of violent acts per minute in a feature film.

I've killed more spiders than I can count, but one particular gremlin got his revenge on me after I stepped forward and squashed him against the intersection of the wall and ceiling. Killed in the tissue, I scraped the vermin off the wall and took a step backwards, to which my wife and I both forgot that the ceiling fan was oscillating on medium.

On the second step, the fan blade connected with the back of my head, and I went down like I was Michael Spinks facing Mike Tyson in his prime.

I didn't bleed or anything, but I still can't get over how hard that fan blade hit the back of my head. It was a clear knockout, and not even a standing eight count could have saved me. There was no concussion - my wife and I went through some standard issues before she let me go to bed - but that was the hardest I've ever been hit in the head.

So to that spider, wherever you are…congratulations on earning my respect. You took your shot and made that last moment a good one. Now please don't ever show up in my house ever again.

*****
Pregame Quote and Prediction

There's no one I'd rather be than me. -Wreck-It Ralph

I put up a complete stink when my wife chose Wreck-It Ralph for movie night a few months ago, but then I realized how I was the target audience for something referencing too many bad video games from the 1980s and 1990s. Kudos to including Dr. Eggman and Q-bert in the same movie, writers.

Anyways, the movie itself wound up being pretty great, and Ralph is a great metaphor about accepting how everyone has a role to play, even if that role requires someone to embrace being the villain. Drawing the straight line as I do, it was refreshing to watch BC embrace its style as a hard-nosed football team, but leaning into the pillars surrounding blue collar football nearly upset Florida State before enabling the wins over Virginia and Army.

I don't expect BC to reinvent the wheel as a football team, but I think the bye week offered a great opportunity to strip the playbook of older schematic designs. I expect BC to run some more complex plays around Thomas Castellanos, and I'm fully envisioning a game plan where his fingerprints start to emerge around some of the different signals and checks. As the starting quarterback, he has to take this offense further down the direction where it's built around his skills, and I really believe the coaching staff gives him the freedom to dictate some of that construction.

In many ways, this is the first opportunity for the Eagles to showcase their next phase. That's not to call the old style vanilla, but they clearly planted seeds for their own identity in those three games. Moving the ball forward, so to speak, is exactly how this team moves back on top of .500 against a stronger-than-expected opponent playing on its home field.

Boston College and Georgia Tech kick off on Saturday at 12 p.m. from Bobby Dodd Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. Television coverage is available on national television via the ACC Network with online streaming available through ESPN's platform of online and mobile apps.. Radio broadcast is also available through the BC Learfield IMG Sports Network with local coverage available on WEEI 93.7 FM and satellite options available on SiriusXM channel 99 or 194. Streaming audio is also available through the Varsity Network.

Next Event

Players Mentioned

Alex Broome

Thomas Castellanos

Emmett Morehead

Kye Robichaux