The possibilities are not necessarily endless, but they are plenty for Georgia Tech football ahead of Sunday’s postseason announcements.
Tech (7-5) will find out its bowl destination and opponent sometime after noon Sunday, which is when ESPN begins to reveal the 12-team College Football Playoff bracket. That announcement will factor into where all 13 bowl-eligible teams out of the ACC will land in the hours that follow.
The ACC has two teams inside the top 12 of the CFP rankings with SMU (11-1) at No. 8 and Miami (10-2) at No. 12. Clemson (9-3), ranked 17th, faces SMU at 8 p.m. Saturday in the ACC title game while Miami is idle.
Should any — or multiple of — those teams make the first-ever 12-team bracket, the 10 bowl games that have agreements in place to select an ACC program will be left to choose their preferred teams and matchups from there.
The Yellow Jackets could very well play in one of those 10 bowl games but are not guaranteed to do so. Those 10 games are the Gasparilla Bowl (Dec. 20, Tampa, Florida), the Birmingham Bowl (Dec. 27), the Holiday Bowl (Dec. 27, San Diego), the Fenway Bowl (Dec. 28, Boston), the Pinstripe Bowl (Dec. 28, New York), the Pop-Tarts Bowl (Dec. 28, Orlando, Florida), the Military Bowl (Dec. 28, Annapolis, Maryland), the Sun Bowl (El Paso, Texas), the Gator Bowl (Jan. 2, Jacksonville, Florida) and the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (Jan. 3, Charlotte, North Carolina).
The ACC splits those games into tiers and, given Tech’s 7-5 record, the Jackets likely will be pegged for some of the lower-tier matchups in New York, Charlotte, Annapolis, Boston, Birmingham or Tampa (where Tech beat Central Florida in 2023).
Tech ended its regular season Nov. 29 in Athens, where it lost 44-42 after eight overtimes to rival Georgia. But it already had secured a postseason opportunity Nov. 9, thanks to a 28-23 victory over Miami at Bobby Dodd Stadium. Its on-field lineup from those games will look drastically different, as backup quarterback Zach Pyron and starting left tackle Corey Robinson have declared their intention to transfer out of the program.
The Jackets will be playing in a bowl game for the second season in a row, the first time the program has done that since the 2013-14 seasons. If they were to win this season’s bowl game, they would avoid a second consecutive 7-6 record and post eight wins for the first time since the 2016 season (9-4).
“The things we’ve built the program on, I do believe we’re seeing,” Key said Thursday on SiriusXM about the growth of his team. “The toughness, the discipline, the commitment to each other and the program and to themselves, the execution — the four pillars of the program, I believe, are showing and they’re gonna continue to show. We gotta continue to improve those.”
Key already is in line, per the terms of his original contract, to receive a $50,000 bonus for getting the Jackets to a bowl game. That bonus will be increased to $100,000 if he leads the Jackets to a win in that game.
Tech has not won bowl games in back-to-back seasons since 2003 and 2004.
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