ATHENS – Georgia Tech turned in its worst shooting performance of the young season Tuesday and lost 76-62 at Georgia to halt a modest two-game winning streak.
The Jackets (4-3) finished with a 32% shooting clip from the field and missed 19 3-pointers in a game in which they never led. After wins last week over two ranked teams, Tuesday’s setback was a sobering result in front of 9,017 fans.
“Let’s be honest, some teams are good at home and some teams are not good on the road. Right now we’re not good on the road,” said Tech coach Damon Stoudamire, whose side also has a road loss at Cincinnati this season. “We gotta get better. When you play on the road you can’t do the same thing and play the same way as you played at home. You can’t take those same shots because sometimes you make bad shots at home. You come on the road, you take a bad shot, now you’re coming back playing defense, you compound the mistakes with a mistake. That’s where we gotta get better.
“There has to be a sense of urgency when you’re on the road. The moment you get to Athens, Georgia, and you get off the bus that’s when you start putting your mind on the game. You can’t come to the game then put your mind on it.”
Miles Kelly and Kowacie Reeves each had 12 points for Tech. The rest of the Yellow Jackets couldn’t provide much support as they missed shots from inside and outside and everywhere in between. Tech also went without shooting a free throw the first 28:13 of the game.
Stoudamire’s team will try to regroup this week and then rebound at 4 p.m. Saturday when it hosts Alabama A&M (1-6).
“We just kinda gotta get back to the drawing board,” Kelly said. “We just gotta come in ready to work in practice and then watch the film and see how we can get better and move on.”
An ugly start Tuesday saw both teams throwing up missed shots for a good chunk of the first half. It wasn’t until Georgia went on a 7-0 run, while Tech went more than five minutes without scoring, that one team finally got some separation with the Bulldogs up 19-10 at the 7:38 mark.
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The Jackets would ultimately go almost six scoreless minutes before a Nait George jumper in the lane broke the spell and cut the deficit to 21-12.
But Tech still couldn’t get anything going offensively from there and finished the first half shooting 26.5% from the field and 2 of 12 from long distance. The Jackets had six turnovers – and UGA scored 10 points off those turnovers – and were outrebounded 27-19.
“We kinda put ourselves in a hole. A lot of self-inflicted things, but at the same, too, you gotta give them credit because they did make shots when they needed to,” Stoudamire said. “After the first 10 minutes we never really did find our way. We’d tried to find a rhythm doing different things, but we just never found it.
“I felt Georgia kept us off-balance pretty much from about the 10-minute mark (of the first half) and from there it was just hard to find a rhythm.”
The Bulldogs took full advantage to the tune of a 36-20 lead and ended the period on an 8-2 run. Noah Thomasson’s 3 with nine seconds on the clock was the final paper cut for the Jackets, whose bleeding only mercifully stopped at the halftime buzzer.
To epitomize the type of night it was for Tech, less than four minutes into the second half Kelly had a 3 go halfway down the cylinder before spinning out. On the other end, seconds later, Jabri Abdur-Rahim buried a 3 from the left corner putting UGA up 42-25, its largest lead of the night at that point.
Now 31-55 all-time in Athens, the Jackets looked like they might get something going with 14:34 remaining when a Deebo Coleman 3 cut the Georgia lead to 42-30 and forced a UGA timeout. Georgia answered with a 9-2 run immediately after that and was up 51-32 after Blue Cain made his third triple of the evening.
“We gotta be tougher in those moments. That’s something that collectively we’ll work on and get better,” Stoudamire said. “We get that stop and come down and get a score we’ll put a little bit more pressure (on Georgia). We never applied pressure on them. The game was never in doubt. We never were able to get it into single digits to put pressure on ‘em to see if there was still something there.”
Tech, which actually outscored its rival by two in the second half, tried its darnedest to mount a comeback late and found itself down 59-45 after a Reeves layup with 7 1/2 minutes to play. It wasn’t meant to be as the shots continued to rim out for the visitors and go in for the home team.
Georgia (6-3) was led by Thomasson’s 16 and Cain’s 12. Cain had signed with Tech in November of 2022 to play for former Tech coach Josh Pastner before opting out of his letter of intent and later enrolling at Georgia.
The 14-point win for the Bulldogs was their largest over Tech since a 21-point triumph in 2017.
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