On Thursday night at his home in Cartersville, Todd Jackson will be surrounded by family and friends for Georgia Tech’s season opener at No. 1 Clemson. Jackson is a Georgia fan, but he is now drawn to pull for the Yellow Jackets because defensive coordinator Andrew Thacker is his cousin.
“Oh, Lord – everything he did was wide open with his hair on fire,” Jackson said of Thacker as a child. “You couldn’t slow him down for anything. If you took your eye off him, he was gone doing something mischievous.”
At the same time, Jackson also has strong rooting interest for the defending national champions. The family of Tigers quarterback Trevor Lawrence, often described as the best college quarterback in a generation, lives a few houses down, and Lawrence is close friends with Jackson’s daughter Allie. In fact, Allie and Trevor dated in high school.
“Cartersville’s crazy about Trevor, and he deserves it,” Jackson said. “He’s a good kid. He’s humble. Every time he comes home, he comes by the house.”
Jackson said his rooting interest for Thursday is “right dead center. I want it to be a close game. That’s what I’m hoping for.”
After Thursday, though, Jackson will be fully on board with the Jackets and his younger cousin.
“They’ve kind of been gone for a while,” he said, “but we’re glad to have him back in town.”
While coach Geoff Collins’ return to Atlanta has been a focal point of his young tenure as Tech’s 20th head coach, those who know Thacker have celebrated his homecoming with equal jubilation. Thacker, who grew up in Cartersville before moving to Forsyth and then Hall counties and has since shot up the coaching ladder, is fully aware that jobs like this don’t always pop up.
“This profession can be incredibly tenuous,” he said. “You can move at a moment’s notice, so anytime you have the opportunity, the advantage to do this, it’s special.”
Or, his mother Donna Miller put it, “It is such a blessing. I’m telling you, sometimes I just have to pinch myself and think, wow.”
Bruce Miller had no idea that his stepson would have an interest in coaching after he graduated in 2007 from Furman, where he had played safety. It wasn’t for lack of exposure. Miller is one of the more successful high-school coaches in Georgia, having won 225 games in 30 years as a head coach at Cass, North Forsyth and Gainesville. He led the Red Elephants to the 2012 state Class AAAAA championship, a team that had another Clemson Tiger of note at quarterback, Deshaun Watson.
Thacker played for him for three years at North Forsyth and one at Gainesville, but not before serving as his attentive ball boy.
“Andrew is so observant, and he’s got a great insight into people and things, and you just don’t realize he’s gathering information the whole time he’s talking with you,” said Miller, who retired from Gainesville after the 2017 season and is now an assistant at Flowery Branch High. “And he has just become a real student of the game.”
Thacker was the youngest of four with three sisters and was crazy about sports. He played football, basketball and ran track in high school, showing speed that he uses in demonstrating drills and challenging Jackets players in races in practice. (At 34, he is the youngest defensive coordinator in the ACC.) Around 7 or 8, he decided he wanted to play basketball, his mother recalled.
“He would get up early in the morning and dribble,” she said. “You could hear him bouncing the ball out on the patio, dribbling.”
A life in coaching was not his intended path. During his time in college, he went on study-abroad programs in Spain and Chile. He had internships in the fields of law, politics and business, his mother said, though they only served to confirm that he didn’t want pursue any of those options. In the spring of 2008, he was preparing to go to grad school at Georgia when his stepfather got a phone call.
It was Collins, then the linebackers coach at Central Florida with coach George O’Leary. Miller actually coached Collins for a season at Rockdale County High, and then Collins recruited Thacker to Western Carolina when he was defensive coordinator there. Thacker ended up at Furman, but Collins kept up with him through Miller.
“Seems like forever ago, but (Collins) said, ‘Do you think Andrew wants to get into coaching?’” Miller said. “I said, ‘Geoff, you’ll have to ask him.’”
Collins wanted Thacker to be a graduate assistant, and a career was soon launched. After UCF, he was a GA at Oklahoma State (2010-12), then safeties coach at Southern Miss (2013), a defensive assistant with the Falcons (2014), then back to UCF as safeties coach (2015). He spent a year with coach Brian Bohannon at Kennesaw State in 2016 coaching linebackers, then reunited with Collins at Temple in 2017.
“Every time that Andrew made a move, he would call Geoff and ask his advice,” Donna Miller said.
Collins provided another break after the first season in Philadelphia, promoting him from linebackers coach to defensive coordinator while changing defensive coordinator Taver Johnson’s title to co-defensive coordinator and assistant head coach. Johnson left to coach cornerbacks at Ohio State a month later.
With Thacker in charge, Temple tied for 11th in defensive yards per play, 14th in defensive passer rating and tied for fifth in interceptions. There was little doubt that Collins would bring him to Tech, making him one of the more prominent coaches in the state where his stepfather has been highly successful in the same field. Thacker has taught his scheme with the same energy and passion that his cousin remembers years later.
After going to Temple, “he said he was going to make it back, and he did,” said Thacker’s father Mickey, a longtime assistant district attorney in Bartow County.
It wasn’t only a joke when, shortly after his hire, Thacker said that being back home meant more date nights “because we’ve got some babysitters.” Besides his father, mother and stepfather, Thacker (married to Liza, with two young children and a third on the way) has grandparents, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles and in-laws in the Atlanta area.
And also a pleasant young man from Cartersville who lives a few houses down from his cousin.
“I don’t wish him anything bad,” Bruce Miller said of Trevor Lawrence, “but, please, have an off-night this one time.”
