Saturday was a growing pain Tech, assistant coach Brent Key, were not expecting to feel
By Michael A. Lough
The Sports Report
centralgasports@gmail.com
There are times when it’s great to be the guest speaker on a Monday at a touchdown or quarterback or booster club gathering, and there are times when it’s brutal.
Brent Key experienced the latter.
The Georgia Tech assistant head coach was Monday night’s speaker at the Macon Touchdown Club, the visit coming about 48 hours after one of the Yellow Jackets’ worst losses in years, 27-24 in overtime to The Citadel, an FCS program running the offense so many Tech people wanted to get rid of under Paul Johnson.
Key was pretty blunt out of the gate about the expletive-deleted that happened Saturday. It wasn’t that Key got grilled or anything, but sometimes talking about a Saturday you want to flush is exhausting.
Of course, the 41-year-old has been around and seen plenty. And heard plenty, considering that the two main head coaches throughout his career have been George O’Leary and Nick Saban.
“I’ve worked for two men in my life, Coach Saban and Coach O’Leary,” the Birmingham, Ala. Native said. “I can take an ass-chewing, I promise you. Ain’t nobody in this room can say nothing to me I haven’t heard.”
Key played under O’Leary, finishing up in 2000 and spending a year at Tech as a graduate assistant. O’Leary left for Notre Dame – for a week – and Key decided this coaching business was too insane and left for commercial real estate in Atlanta.
“Six weeks into it, I was trying to figure out how to get back into coaching,” Key said.
Key spent a year at Western Carolina, then joined O’Leary’s staff at Central Florida, serving the final two seasons as offensive coordinator. He then moved to Alabama to coach the offensive line.
One reason Key left for Tech – and apparently stunned Saban with the decision – was because of the similarities organizationally with O’Leary, Saban and Collins. The chance to work at his alma mater in a new situation was just too much to overcome.
Not that anybody expected the third game of a hyped and social-media-heavy regime would involve a loss to an FCS team that had been to the playoffs only twice since the early 90s and came in 0-2 to face a team off a revenge win over South Florida.
The loss Saturday was bad, with all sorts of topics to break down, from juggling quarterbacks to suddenly uncharacteristic penalties to missed field goals and a missed PAT to clock management issues to losing the line of scrimmage to taking a team lightly.
“This team was praised the week before for how they were accountable to their teammates the week before,” he said. “They were commended on how they played disciplined football. We had five (penalties) the first two games.”
There was some overconfidence after beating South Florida.
“Got a win on (last) Saturday to a team they’d lost to the year before,” Key said. “Practice … you’re supposed to clap at certain things. All of a sudden, guys weren’t clapping. You rest on your laurels, rest on the discipline you had.”
“Three penalties, unsportsmanlike penalties, led to 16 extra minutes of possession for their offense,” Key said. “The game of football, especially when you’re playing an option-based team … those are things you can’t get back.”
And there was the issue at the end of regulation with a penalty, a clock runoff, and a timeout that nullified what looked like a game-winning touchdown run from Northside grad Tobias Oliver.
Oliver took the snap with six seconds left, and sprints surprisingly easy to the end zone for the apparent game-winner. But Collins, with the clock running down, called timeout. The clock on the Fox Sports screen stopped with four seconds left, indicating the timeout.
Collins didn’t want the game clock to run out, thus he called the timeout. One major part of Key’s explanation, though, was incorrect.
The procedure call with 23 seconds left led to the 10-second runoff. That rule, Key noted, went into effect in 2011 to prevent offenses from stopping the clock with a penalty rather than a timeout. A team can save the 10 seconds by calling timeout. In this case, Tech had only one timeout left.
But the on-field explanation was different than what Tech heard.
“Here’s where things get squirrelly,” Key said. “They announced over the loudspeaker the clock will start on the snap. The rule says the clock starts on the ready-for-play, because it was a 10-second runoff with 23 seconds. The referee told Coach Collins, and they announced over the loudspeaker that the clock would start on the snap.
“We go up there, we make the play call. The clock is running. The clock is running.”
The loudspeaker announcement is actually the referee, Stuart Mullins, not the public address announcer, so it’s official, not a misinterpretation from a public address announcer. And Mullins clearly says: “Clock operator, please set the game clock at 13 seconds, and start it on the ready for play.”
A reporter asked Collins about the situation in the postgame press conference, and mistakenly said that the referee said the clock would start on the snap.
“I think everybody got that explanation,” Collins said. “Everybody in the stadium got that explanation. … What you said was said, was said, was said.”
Except, well, it wasn’t. Whether the official he told Collins something different on the sideline with the microphone off is undetermined: “I’m not at liberty to say referee things. “
Of course, that it came to anywhere near that situation overshadowed it, between the penalties, missed kicks, and porous defense against a familiar offense.
While it was a much worse Monday than Key had anticipated, he remains undaunted. As one would expect from somebody who played for and coached under O’Leary and spent a few years with Saban. There was a reason his back hurt and his voice was leaving him.
“I’m going to sit here with ‘Georgia Tech’ on my shirt and be just as proud as I was if we had won the game on Saturday,” he said. “That doesn’t change one thing about the way I feel about the place I coach and the place I live.”