Ask and Ye Shall Receive: Jackets Give Near-Perfect Effort, Win ACC Coastal

(Paul Johnson and the Jackets have booked a trip to Tampa.)

A perfect game.

It has been Paul Johnson's lusted-for holy grail all season. The Jackets beat Virginia Tech, and he still found fault. They rolled up 56 points and almost 600 yards of offense at Vanderbilt, but there were flaws, he said.

He said even this week that the Jackets have yet to play what he considers a perfect game. So how did this one register in his gradebook?

The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets answered the bell, demolishing Duke 49-10 on the road and clinching for themselves a place in the ACC Championship next month. The win was Tech's eighth in a row, a feat not matched since a man named Dodd was head coach.

Struggling early, it was, somewhat ironically, a special teams play that sparked a rout.

Down 10-0 with momentum against them, the Jackets set up to return a Duke kickoff, only to have Orwin Smith fumble the kick. He picked it up, found a seam, and sprinted to the Duke two-yard line, setting up Tech's first touchdown.

Those seven points (PAT included) would be the first of a crushing 49 unanswered points, paving the way for Georgia Tech's second trip to the ACC title game since the split-division format began.

Total perfection is something coaches everywhere say is impossible to achieve, and they're probably right. But the Jackets gave it the old college try Saturday, rolling up 500-plus yards of offense while holding Duke to less than 300 of its own.

They harried Thaddeus Lewis, the Blue Devils' quarterback, into an uncharacteristically average day, while Josh Nesbitt probably threw some of the best passes of his college career.

In short, the Jackets weren't perfect, but they were darn close. And close was more than enough.

Johnson is a man well-known for his demanding demeanor. On Saturday, he gave his team credit for reacting to that in just the way he wants.

"Sometimes I get after them," Johnson told Jeff Schultz of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I got in the face of a couple of them today, even when the score got to be [one-sided]. They’ve learned to accept that and go on. Other kids might not. So my hats off to them. They’ve earned it."