Sept. 29, 2007
By Jack Wilkinson –
Listen, my children, and you shall sense the complete domination by Tech’s defense. Hardly a Jacket was then alive who remembers September of ’85. September 28, 1985, to be exact. The last time Georgia Tech held Clemson to three lousy points.
“I wasn’t even here yet,” Darryl Richard said, and the big defensive tackle smiled and chuckled. Richard was born in Louisiana on June 17, 1986. Indeed, only a handful of Yellow Jackets – geezers like Philip Wheeler, Kevin Tuminello, Avery Roberson, Matt Rhodes and old man Adamm Oliver – were even alive in ’85 when Tech went up to Clemson and stifled the Tigers, 14-3.
By twilight Saturday, the Jackets had nearly matched that final score, and more than atoned for their most recent trip to Clemson and the last two weeks’ disappointments.
“It was like a redemption,” Wheeler, the superb senior linebacker, said of Tech’s 13-3 victory at Bobby Dodd Stadium. A year ago at Clemson, the Tigers touched Howard’s Rock, ran down the hill and sicced James Davis and C.J. Spiller on the Jackets. Davis ran for 216 yards and two touchdowns, while Spiller gained 116 yards and scored twice, once on a 50-yard TD pass.
In all, Clemson rushed for 321 yards, the first team to top the 300-yard mark against Tech since Wake Forest in 1999. That was then. This was Saturday:
Davis: 12 carries, 60 yards – but just 9 in the first half.
Spiller: 9 carries, 2 democratic yards – 1 in each half.
Total rushing yardage for Clemson: 34 yards in 32 carries.
Total rushing yardage for Tashard Choice: 32 yards alone on just one of his 32 carries, 145 yards total and the game’s lone touchdown. Hamstring be damned.
“It’s OK,” Choice said of the injured left hamstring that limited him to 5 carries for 19 yards in last week’s loss at Virginia. Then this: “I wasn’t at 100 percent today. I lied the whole week, but I had to. It was absolutely hurting me to watch my teammates struggling like they’ve been. All the hard work you put into the season, to not be able to be out there fighting with your teammates is hard.”
Particularly when a promising 2-0 start has fizzled with conference losses to Boston College and UVa. And now here came Clemson, 4-0 and potent, and all those orange overalls driving down I-85 and filling up the upper deck of the north end zone. No Tech team had started ACC play 0-3 since 1993, when Bill Lewis’ last Tech team finished a 1-10 train wreck.
When Saturday dawned brilliantly – not a cloud in the clear blue sky and, it seemed, not a care in the world for Clemson – Tech faced a daunting task: Stop Davis and Spiller, or kiss any chance at another Coastal Division title and a return to the ACC Championship Game goodbye.
That only made the Jackets’ defensive stand even more significant.
“Our backs were against the wall, and we had to get a ‘W’ and do whatever we had to do,” said Wheeler, whose 2-1/2 sacks included one in an interminable 51-minute first quarter (on the first series after Choice’s 2-yard, stand-up touchdown gave Tech the lead for good at 7-3), and the second on Clemson’s first possession of the second quarter. By then, a pattern was set: the Tigers wouldn’t run roughshod over Jon Tenuta’s defense this time.
‘If you stop the run, you gain a tremendous advantage,” said Tech head coach Chan Gailey, who praised Tenuta’s defensive game plan, and the Jackets’ mindset and focus on executing their defensive coordinator’s strategy.
“It was a team effort on defense,” Gailey said. “Guys were trying to stuff the corners. Try to make ’em run sideways and tackle ’em on the corners. I think it was a great plan.” There would be no orange freeway from tackle-to-tackle this time.
“The mindset was going out and dominating,” said Richard, the redshirt junior who’s already graduated, has started on his MBA and who helped stopped the bleeding for Tech. “During the week, we looked at that [2006] game and there were four plays that went for over 200 yards.”
“Hey, those guys are special,” Richard said of Davis and Spiller. “Everybody knows that when you talk about running back tandems in America, those guys are in there.”
Not Saturday, however. Due to one fundamental reason: Fundamentals.
“Tackling,” said Richard, who made 3 tackles himself, 1-1/2 for losses. “I’m really being honest with you. Tackling. We know they’ve got a great running attack, but you can’t allow them to have 50-yard plays.”
Clemson’s longest play Saturday: a 29-yard reception by Jacoby Ford, one of 17 completions by Cullen Harper. But they only garnered 194 yards, none resulted in points and one was intercepted – by freshman Morgan Burnett, early in the fourth quarter. It was the first interception all season for Harper, who’d thrown 165 passes without a pick.
By then, Richard could more than sense Clemson’s frustration – particularly after four consecutive missed field goal attempts by Mark Buchholz. The junior from Alpharetta fared much better kicking a soccer ball Friday night (assisting on both goals in Clemson’s 4-2 loss to Duke) than he did a football – at least after making a 48-yard field goal just 1:08 into Saturday’s affair. That followed Choice’s lost fumble on the game’s first play from scrimmage.
“It wasn’t just ‘sense it’ – you saw it,” Richard said of the Tigers’ frustration. “You could almost hear it: ‘These guys aren’t supposed to be playing with us like that.'”
But then, these guys were playing with a deep sense of purpose, not merely to win. Survival is a powerful motivator. Especially when Tech’s goal is Jacksonville, Dec. 1, you’re already 0-2 in the ACC, it’s not even October yet and your backs – as well as linemen, specialists and coaches, too – are against that proverbial wall.
“I think our back was part of the wall,” Richard said, laughing. “We had to fight our way back into the room. If you want a chance to win a championship, you have to do that.
“We were very adamant about that,” he said. “”We feel we’re a team that can contend for the conference championship. When you’re in the situation where you’re 0-2, you have to realize, ‘We can still get there if we win this game.’ We still want to get to Jacksonville.”
