Sunday Morning Comes

This is later than usual because I just can't get my head around what happened yesterday. Not because we lost. We should have lost. Not because we were in a position to win. We should have won. This is the first Georgia Tech game in a while where I felt like they match up to us well. Not talent wise, but being in a position to win ball games wise. And we should have won, except we deserved to lose.

There'll be plenty of time to debate the micro level stuff: offensive line play, defensive line play, Quayvon Hicks kick return team face, fumbles, kickoffs......but the bigger issue is that we are still so afraid of messing up that we don't want to go win ballgames. Instead, we try not to lose them. Think about the squib kick. Tech hasn't had but five kick returns of longer than 30 yards all season. They needed to get the ball to the Georgia 40 or so for a hope and a prayer FG. We gave away half of what they needed by kicking it to the 30 yard line.

And you can't say that Mark Richt hasn't changed his mindset on things. We ran a fake FG. We didn't keep trying to run the ball on Ted Roof when it was clear our Oline was having their worst game of the season. We kept going to quick slant that was working. We finally adjusted our defensive alignment to pressure Thomas (albeit three quarters late).

I feel for Hutson Mason. The interception wasn't his fault, any more than it was Mitchell's fault. The Tech DB made a heck of a play on the ball to intercept it. We've been saying for six months that Hutson Mason wasn't the type of QB that can put a team on his shoulders and win a game for you. Yet, he put Georgia on his shoulders and got us a lead with 18 seconds left in the game.

That should be enough to win.

Like I said, we'll get to the micro level stuff later, but right now the football program has some stuff to figure out. As a program, we are about where I thought we'd be this season (actually, I felt 9-3 was our upside). The problem is we are so inconsistent. We look like we could beat anyone in the world one week, then struggle fail the next.

That is the thing that I can't get my head around. Yesterdays' game was a near perfect microcosm of our entire season. We looked spectacular, then we'd look over matched. We'd dominate the line of scrimmage, then we'd get pushed around. We'd make fantastic special teams plays, then we'd do the exact opposite.

We were in position to win a game that we had no business winning (expect we should have won), but we chose to play to not lose. The hard part is if I'm being honest, I felt exactly this way in 2001 after the Music City Bowl, and countless times since then. That's a tough place to be.
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