On the right calf of Tom Luginbill, there’s a tattoo featuring the athletic logos of Palomar Junior College, Eastern Kentucky University and Georgia Tech.
“And I’m proud of all three of them,” Luginbill told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They all created a different set of circumstances in a different environment. You live and you learn and you grow and all those sorts of things. I actually look back upon the whole thing (at Tech) fairly fondly. I really do.”
Thirty years ago Luginbill arrived in Atlanta as a national champion quarterback from Palomar (California) Junior College. He was named the starter coming out of preseason camp, a decision not favored by the public given that returning starting quarterback Donnie Davis would now be the backup.
The Yellow Jackets went 1-10 that season, fired coach Bill Lewis after eight games and named George O’Leary the permanent coach in November. Luginbill would go on to finish his playing career at EKU.
“I learned a lot about myself, I learned about how you respond when things don’t go your way or you’re dealing with failure for the first time and on the field you haven’t dealt with much of that — and I hadn’t leading up to that point,” Luginbill added. “Then, of course, you have the coaching shuffle. It was one of those scenarios that I wish could have gone better for everybody, not just myself.”
Luginbill will be seeing a lot more of the stadium he spent that one fateful fall in as he will now serve as the analyst for ACC prime time football games this season alongside play-by-play man Wes Durham and sideline reporter Dana Boyle, the ACC Network is announcing Monday. Luginbill, in fact, is scheduled to be on Tech’s campus July 30 to check out the Jackets.
His new role with the ACC Network has been one a decade in the making, he explained, having previously served primarily as a field analyst for ESPN and ABC broadcasts. He has also broadcast a wide variety of UFL, XFL, Mid-American Conference and Sun Belt Conference games all while providing college football recruiting insight along the way.
But he had been yearning for a permanent spot in the broadcast booth for the past few years having sensed his field analyst role had run its course. The notion to join the ACC Network was first offered to him in December after Luginbill, a Charlotte resident, was on the call for the Cotton Bowl.
“My whole thing when it was presented to me was, ‘Well if I wanna make this transition and move over, I wanna be the face of the network,’ " Luginbill said. “If there’s a go-to item, if there’s a go-to piece of analysis, if there are a variety of different things that I could present to be involved in, that’s kind of how I want to dive in. Our folks above me were very receptive of that.”
The ACC that Luginbill will cover, of course, is vastly different from the one he played in during his ‘94 season. The Jackets went 0-8 then and finished last in the nine-team league.
Now the conference features 17 schools and spans from Syracuse, New York, to Miami, Florida, to Dallas, Texas, to California. Luginbill, who was named the ACC newcomer of the year in 1994 after throwing for 2,128 yards (a mark that still ranks 12th in a single Tech season), added he’s excited to help usher in this new era of the league.
“I couldn’t come in at a better time with the expansion of the College Football Playoff. To be able to expand the market, that’s what (SMU) does in the great state of Texas, and then you’ve got two institutions out west that expand the footprint out there as well,” he said. “We’re in the most competitive landscape of survive-or-die that we’ve seen in college athletics in the last 40 years. Everybody’s trying to make sure that they’ve got a chair when the music stops.
“With that expanded playoff, you start to look at schedules, and you start to look at the transfer portal and how teams are built and how they’re devised, you could potentially have three to four teams that could go 10-2. That’s a big deal when it comes to the College Football Playoff. I think it’s gonna be fun. I think it’s gonna be fun to see how teams handle the travel, how they handle the time zone shift, the new scheduling model. It’s going to be really interesting to watch it unfold.”
