“It was apparent to me that our guys were having a hard time doing what we were asking them to do,” Johnson said. “I think we had 47 missed assignments in the Clemson game. Some of the stuff we were trying to do was good stuff if you can do it, but we were having a hard time doing it.”
but they are going to move away from the two-gap philosophy, which was giving the players fits, and revert to the one-gap. The two-gapping is rare at the collegiate level, but pro teams have stronger, faster athletes who can get it done. It requires a player to fight off a block, and make a tackle to his left or right.
“It became apparent to me we were struggling with it,” Johnson said. “We did not have the personnel to do what we were doing. Now do we have the personnel to do something else? We’re going to find out.”
Johnson said his decision to fire Groh was about 12 games in the making, and was an “ongoing process” dating back to last season.
“It just came to the fact we weren’t playing very well,” Johnson said. “We’ve played football for a long time here at Georgia Tech, and we managed to give up 40 points in three consecutive games for the first time in the history of Georgia Tech football. Statistically we were 107 or 108 in the country on third downs. We were 91st in scoring. Any way you look at it, it wasn’t good. If you keep doing the same thing -- and I think Al Groh is a very smart man, he’s a good man -- but clearly it wasn’t working for us. He has a system and he runs his system. His system was not working for us, so we have to try to change. The definition of futility would be to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results. It wasn’t working.”
