Yellow Jacket Victory Still Leaves One Lingering Question

(Josh Nesbitt brought his passing hat Saturday night)

Saturday night was supposed to be a tough test for a still-unproven Georgia Tech team.

An SEC foe with promising results, a tough road environment, two big-time conference games on the horizon.

And in a tribute to the rest of their season -- now near its halfway mark -- the Jackets impressed, then left plenty of ambiguity on the field behind them.

Let's break this down:

Positives

On one hand, the Jackets ran for 216 yards, and that was the lesser end of their offensive output. (Yes, that is correct, stop the presses, Georgia Tech passed the ball.) Josh Nesbitt was both efficient and proficient, hitting for 266 yards on an almost-unbelievable 11-of-14 passing with one touchdown.

Tech's defense forced five turnovers, scored directly off one of those turnovers, only gave the ball away once themselves and generally, the Jackets controlled the game, making sure it never looked in doubt.

Negatives

That same five-turnover defense also allowed 487 yards and 31 points to a team that's not exactly an offensive juggernaut.

There was one fumble lost, but three more committed, and those won't always bounce back toward their original owner.

Perhaps most concerning, there was still a glaring inability to focus for 60 minutes the way a championship team should. At several moments, Georgia Tech looked poised to put Mississippi State away, or even looked like they had put Mississippi State away, only for the Bulldogs to cobble together a strong drive and score again.

In other words, what should have been -- and probably could have been -- a 42-17 or 42-21 scoreline was 42-31. It's still a double-digit win, but great teams don't have to leave their starters in through the fourth quarter of games like this, because such games are already well in hand.

"I'm not sure everything clicked," coach Paul Johnson said after the game. "But we had enough guys make some plays, and we did enough things -- 42 is more than 31."

Translation: Pretty good. Better than two weeks ago. Almost definitely not better than last week. Probably not good enough to win the ACC.

Overall, this was a good win for Tech.

Realistically, it's a road win against a decent team, at very least, and the balance and playmaking ability Tech showed on both sides of the ball was impressive.

Yet somehow we always come back to the same "however": This isn't the performance of a conference champion. Tech needs to play with more consistent focus, and they need to figure out how to close out a game when they've put themselves in position to do so.

If they can ever learn that, the Yellow Jackets are an even more dangerous team than they are right now. And that would be an impressive sight.