Buzz Kill: Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets' Title Hopes Squashed by Miami

With his team down 16 points and perhaps his best pass of the season rolling into the warm Miami night, Josh Nesbitt crouched, curled and defeated, on the field at Land Shark Stadium. It's hard to speculate what was running through his mind beyond immediate disappointment. But it's not tough to venture a guess.

Any national title hopes, slim as they were, that Georgia Tech possessed are now surely gone. An ACC title run even looks a tall task now.

Frankly, getting out of Miami might be the biggest victory of the week for a team completely played off the field Thursday night against a swaggering, determined Miami team.

Let's make one thing clear: Miami was not going to lose this game.

After enduring four losing years to Georgia Tech, you could just feel that this would not be a game the Jackets could win. If Tech scored 9,999 points, Miami would find a way to 10,002. It was just going to happen.

But it's how it happened that ought to disturb even the optimists on the Flats.

There was no emotion, no focus, no execution. Like Clemson a week prior, Miami came out wanting to challenge Georgia Tech, to take the game to them from every snap, not giving them time to find a rhythm or set up their option.

And as against Clemson, Tech, more often than not, backed down, scared, confused, or simply outmanned by a team whose intensity they completely failed to match.

Offensively, the line was once again little more than mediocre. The 'Canes bull-rushed Tech all night, getting the kind of backfield penetration that can render the option useless while at the same time staying home on Jonathan Dwyer (whose loss to injury is in no way good news for the Jackets).

The defense—well, they were disappointing against the run, which seems so insignificant when you consider the way Jacory Harris dismantled it through the air as a distempered child would smash a cardboard fort.

We said all along that after tonight, we would know what kind of team this is.

Good, but not great. Probably bowl-worthy, but almost certainly not a BCS threat.

Be absolutely sure, this is gut-check time for the Jackets. They have an extended week now to rest their tired legs (three games in 13 days) and take an honest evaluation of what they are, where they are, and where they want to go as a team.

The offense can succeed—last season proved it. But teams weren't going to come out confused and scared again this season. It doesn't work that way.

All offseason, when the talking heads slated Tech for a possible BCS trip, Johnson told anyone who would listen that his team hadn't earned anything yet, and his players seemed to echo that attitude. Their play suggests otherwise, but this night proved that notion in spades. 

These next eight days are the most important of the season, hands down.

The Yellow Jackets' season can now go one of two ways.

1) Collect themselves, rest the legs, and get really angry before blowing apart a UNC team that kept Tech out of the ACC title game last year. Such a win would effectively put the Jackets' season back on the right course, though still far away from its intended destination.

2) Do just the opposite and watch a promising season with a talented team blow slowly, aimlessly away, like dying leaves in a brisk fall wind.

The ball, to torture the metaphor of rival sport, is very much in their court.