Sloppy play leads to a sloppy result
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In the annual Mercedes-Benz Stadium game, Georgia Tech fell to the #12 Notre Dame Fighting Irish 31-13 after scoring the opening touchdown and allowing 31 unanswered. Tech falls to 5-3 while Notre Dame has won five straight after losing at home to Northern Illinois in week 2.
For the Jackets, so much of this game was defined by who wasn’t playing. This was the first game in the Haynes King era where he missed a start, meaning Zach Pyron got his first start since breaking his collarbone in 2022. Linebacker Kyle Efford was announced as a late scratch, putting Tech without their leading tackler.
The result? The run game was far less dynamic, going for only 64 yards on 2.2 yards/play, Pyron the leader with 45 yards of mostly scrambles. Chad Alexander and Jamal Haynes both finished with under 20 rushing yards. Defensively, Tech was missing tackles all over the place and got gashed for 168 rushing yards allowed.
Zach Pyron did throw for a career high 269 passing yards and a garbage time touchdown, but with two interceptions on poor throws.
Tech’s first scoring drive that ended the first quarter was the lone highlight of the game, a 13 play, 71 yard drive that took up 7:06 and gave Tech a 7-0 lead. A Warren Burrell interception in the endzone gave Tech the ball initially on the drive.
Notre Dame did not waste time grabbing control of the game, scoring on both of their second quarter drives to take a 14-7 lead. Their first full drive of the third quarter resulted in their third straight touchdown drive, going up 21-7 only a few minutes into the second half.
From there, three of Tech’s next four possessions resulted in turnovers, two interceptions and one on downs, including a pick six that put Notre Dame up 31-7. In the most garbage of garbage time, Tech did get a last second touchdown with a seemingly injured Zach Pyron staying on the field. I missed that whole part so I can’t comment on how the drive actually panned out or how bad Pyron’s injury looked.
In the postgame presser, Key did reassure that Haynes King’s injury is not season ending, so we’ll see him back at some point. No word yet on if it will be for Virginia Tech or Miami.
Miscellaneous observations from MBS
- Notre Dame twice converted 4th downs on trick plays, one on a fake punt in the 4th quarter that essentially put the game completely out of hand, and then later a fake field goal where the holder ran for the first down.
- Notre Dame did play complete football, don’t let my short recap sell them short. Leonard played smart football outside of the one interceptionTheir performance required Tech to play as well as they ever had under Brent Key, but that was not the team that showed up.
- The crowd felt about 50/50 Tech to Notre Dame people, which honestly was better than I was expecting. The reported crowd was 59,021, so at least the game drew more than we could’ve fit inside Bobby Dodd Stadium.
- In all three of our losses, we haven’t been able to run the ball at all. Not having Haynes looked to be a real factor in this because Pyron was not doing designed runs as often, and Jamal/Chad were completely ineffective all game. We may not have scored 31 if the run game was working, but that’s what gives us enough offense to at least get 17-20 in a game, which would’ve made this much more respectable than what we did.
- I say all of this, but we were playing with house money the entire time. We had no idea how Pyron would look, and he had to start against a potential playoff team after only doing 1 yard run plays all year. We didn’t have our offensive and defensive leaders the entire game, that’s not nothing. Hopefully Pyron isn’t so hurt that we might to play Aaron Philo next week.
- The recap was short because there’s not much worth remembering about the game. At least the roof was open and it was a beautiful environment to watch football, but I am more than ok with forgetting this game ever happened.
