The Georgia Tech football team begins spring practice Monday morning, the next step on the journey for coach Brent Key’s second team of Yellow Jackets.
Key and Tech are coming off a 7-6 season and win over Central Florida in the Gasparilla Bowl. Those results have increased expectations for a program looking to make its first ACC title game since 2014 and for its first ACC title since 2009.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently sat down with Key to discuss the state of his program and what to expect over the next five weeks of spring practice:
Q: How have the past few months been in comparison to this time last year, your first full offseason as the program’s coach?
A: “It’s been interesting. Going into Year 2, talking to a lot of people, they say it’s always kind of your toughest year because you see everything you did in the first year, you’re trying to make the adjustments and corrections and to get things to the way they should be – but you also can’t lose sight of why you did things well.
“So it’s not redoing things, but making those small adjustments. A lot of people are like, ‘Year 2, you should be in your groove now.’ To me that’s not really the way I’m wired. You don’t get in a groove. You’re always trying to get better. At the same time you don’t want to try to reinvent the wheel from things that were good. So finding that balance between the two, it’s been fun, but challenging.”
Q: Part of the handful of changes on your coaching staff included bringing in Tyler Santucci to be the team’s new defensive coordinator. Why do you feel Santucci was the right coach for that position?
A: “It’s never a comfortable thing to make change. But there’s also an expectation for who we want to be as a program and how we need to get there. Offensively last year from a coaching standpoint, they really set a standard that you wanna see. That standard has been raised now, and it’s something that’s a new ceiling that you’re working to achieve. I feel like defensively when I look out there and am around these guys, there’s that same energy, there’s that same passion. No discredit or negative toward anyone that’s been here.
“I really think the fit is really good right now. To be a great fit as a defensive staff, offensive staff, special-teams staff, it’s gotta start with the 10 other coaches. They’ve gotta be all locked in together to show that camaraderie, show that they’re on the same page on the field. I’ve really seen that from (Santucci), which is great. I think he’s a really outstanding fit for where we’re at right now and what we’re trying to do.”
Q: What are some of the main areas you’re looking at for this team to improve by the time spring practice has finished?
A: “Build toughness. We gotta become a tougher football team. We gotta become more disciplined in what we do. It’s really the way you execute your assignment, if you’re disciplined to block out the external, the discipline to do what you’re supposed to do off the field. Do you have the discipline to not let the way you feel – your feelings can’t affect the way you come out every day. It can’t affect how you work. That’s all discipline.
“Then the big one that was dug into a little more was execution. Execution doesn’t mean just on the surface really what people think it does. The end-all be-all means to do your job. Going into Year 2, people think, ‘Oh I did my job last year, now I can start moving outside of that and doing other things.’ That’s whether it’s staff, or it starts with myself, whether it’s the coaching staff or the players. You have a job to do.
“And when you do your job it creates confidence in, No. 1 yourself, and then your teammates. The final part of that execution is you’re confident to go execute and to do your job. Now you’re winning the 50-50 balls every time. You have the confidence to go make a play. That’s where execution has gotta continue to grow for us is our players’ confidence to go do it. Not just thinking it’s gonna happen because it has happened before, but the confidence to go out and every single play, treat every play independently, every day independently, and reset those four (program pillars of toughness, discipline, execution and commitment). We talk about and go do them.”
Q: What else should the public know about Georgia Tech football?
A: “It’s an exciting time at Georgia Tech. It’s really exciting. We got a great group of kids. We really do. They understand expectations. They understand challenges. They understand what they have to do. And they’re kids. They do a heckuva job. They’re bought in to things that we talk about and that we do. They work their tails off.
“They do well in school. They’re a good group of kids, they really are. That’s important, that we continue to uphold the values of what Georgia Tech is and what it means to so many people, including myself. And that we don’t have coaches or players or people that go out and do things to embarrass the institution. We wanna go out and make this place proud by the way they perform in school, by the way they perform in society and in their social lives. Most importantly to the fans, the way they perform on the field on Saturdays. I’ve been proud of them. We got a long way to go still.”
Q: And they seem like a hungry bunch?
A: “Yeah, that was the message the first Sunday meeting we walked back in. I said, ‘Look guys, anybody that thinks last year was a success, then you don’t understand what success truly is.’ We had successful parts of the season. But, I said, ‘If that’s as excited as you wanna get, celebrating after a bowl game, then you don’t need to be here. That should be a warmup for celebrating for championships. You come to play college football to graduate and have a great career for the rest of your life, or be set up for a great career, and come to play for championships and put yourself in position to play at the highest level. That’s why you play college football.’
“We still got a ways to go. We’ll get through spring and kind of see where things are at.”
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