The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets might have shocked the college football world with their win over the defending ACC champion Florida State Seminoles on Saturday in Dublin. Still, in reality, it should never have been such a surprise.
Behind head coach Brent Key, the program is building a behemoth that is set up for sustained success in an ever-changing college football climate.
Win Over Florida State No Fluke as Georgia Tech Builds a Bright Future
If someone told you that head coach Key had just orchestrated one of the shocks of the college football season in the opening game of the campaign, you wouldn’t believe it from his demeanor. That’s because, for the leader of the Yellow Jackets, he believed this was possible all along. He believes in his team. He believes in his program. He believes in the vision for success.
“I was confident this week,” Key explains midway through his address to the media in the wake of a 24-21 win over Florida State in Dublin. “I was confident because of the plan that was put together and the progress I’ve seen made, really from the start of the year until now.”
While the win over Florida State to start the 2024 college football season is the result of the progress made from the start of the year, it really is just building off the success of the first season under Key in 2023. The Yellow Jackets have been a team trending upward since he took the reins, and the optimism and excitement around the program are legitimate.
You could see the change in the program from the minute he took over during the 2022 campaign. This is a group of players, a “brotherhood” as the student-athletes presented to the media postgame consistently referred to, that wants to play for their head coach.
A 1-3 team that Key inherited from Geoff Collins went 4-4 down the stretch under the interim head coach. When he earned the job full-time, that eight-game stretch provided a springboard into a 2023 campaign that returned the program to bowl eligibility for the first time since the end of the Paul Johnson era of Yellow Jacket football.
Last season, with two wins over AP Poll Top-25 teams and a close-fought contest with a then-undefeated Georgia, then provided a springboard into what played out in front of a sold-out crowd in Dublin in Week 0.
Georgia Tech had an allocation of more than 10,000 and didn’t return a single ticket.
The victory over Florida State is just part of a pattern of success in 2024 for the Yellow Jackets that points to an extremely bright future for the program. Georgia Tech currently has the 20th-ranked 2025 recruiting class, according to 247Sports, buoyed by the recent capture of five-star offensive tackle Josh Petty, who will have loved the fight in the GT O-line in Dublin.
Unsurprisingly, head coach Key was a significant contributor to the Yellow Jackets’ landing the highest-ranked recruit in program history.
“Coach Key has been amazing through all of this,” Petty told the media in the wake of his commitment.
“Being able to bring back the old GT, the GT that I watched growing up, the competitive guys like Calvin Johnson catching bombs, it’s impressive to see, and [Key] wanting to do that with in-state players and guys just like me and guys all around me, guys that I’ve grown up with and played against since I was young, I bought in on that, and I believe it … he really wants to get this done with Georgia guys.”
The final point is pivotal to understanding the shift in the program and realizing that last season or the win over Florida State isn’t a flash in the pan for Georgia Tech football. There are fertile recruiting grounds in Georgia, and Key is harnessing the university location to win in recruiting.
In this modern era of college football, there’s also an NIL element to any success that a program has in recruiting and the transfer portal. There’s no point in trying to deny it, you have to embrace it, and that’s exactly what Georgia Tech is doing.
“At the end of the day, from a NIL front, from a revenue-sharing perspective, we’re in the game,” Georgia Tech Athletic Director J Batt told Pro Football Network CEO Matthew Cannata earlier this week at an event in Dublin. “I think that was a huge step forward that we decided as a group a couple of years ago that we were going to lean into that and certainly a participant.”
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However, it isn’t just NIL fuelling a renaissance of a program that hasn’t had a double-digit win season since 2014.
“I think Brent Key has done a really good job. In this transfer portal environment, where authenticity of leadership is more important than it’s ever been, Brent Key is an authentic leader who believes in Georgia Tech. He believes in the things that make Georgia Tech special, and he believes in his kids.
“I think our student-athletes feel that, not only in the recruiting process but also when they get here. I think as you look through the past two years of his leadership, we’ve not only recruited at a really high level but he’s also retained a lot of student-athletes. You can say that’s all NIL, but a lot of that has to do with him as an authentic leader.”
Therein lies the — excuse the pun — key.
There is a perfect storm swirling around Georgia Tech right now. Between their ability to harness NIL to retain and recruit at a high level while targeting in-state talent to build a “local” football team that the community can become invested in, they have the pieces in place to build a successful program the like of which hasn’t been seen in years.
In head coach Key, they have the perfect leader to ensure all those factors come together to create a sustained environment and culture of success. The days of Georgia Tech being a surprise winner, like this weekend in Dublin, could soon be numbered.
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