Georgia Tech Men’s Basketball In Need of a Change

Double Digit Loss To 2-19 Louisville is Just Another Card in the Deck of Poor Performances

Matthew Kistner | Feb 3, 2023

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Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets

Men’s Basketball enters the weekend coming off two horrendous losses that complement an eight-game losing streak. The first of which is a 43-point loss to Duke at home and the second was a humiliating double-digit loss to 2-19 Louisville which granted the Cardinals their first ACC win of the season. Georgia Tech has not been within single digits at the final buzzer since January 10th and has not won a game since their miraculous upset of 12th-ranked Miami on January 4th. The team sits in last place in the ACC with a 1-11 record in conference play and is on pace to only pick up one more win this season, being when Florida Tech comes to McCamish on February 18th. All of this beckons a singular question: what went wrong?

Georgia Tech is just two years removed from an ACC title and NCAA Tournament appearance. In just two years, this program has translated from trending towards elite to irrelevant and it shows in the stands with most “home” games housing more fans of the visiting team than Tech fans. Most of this is to blame on Head Coach Josh Pastner and former athletic director Todd Stansbury. Pastner has been at the helm since 2016, originally coming from Memphis where he was quite successful, but has significantly declined in his 7-year tenure at Tech.

Under Pastner, the program has had four losing seasons in the ACC, not counting this season, and four finishes in the bottom third. Pastner’s biggest seasons were in 2019 and 2020, finishing both years with a winning record and winning an ACC Tournament Championship in 2020. These seasons came as a result of Pastner’s development of his first recruiting classes which included key names like Moses Wright and Jose Alvarado. However, since these original recruiting classes, it would appear that Pastner has lost his charm, having 247sports clock the recruiting classes the past three seasons at 74th in 2020, 30th in 2021, and 134th in 2022. The 2023 recruiting class sits at 65th with one commit: Blue Cain, a 4-star guard out of the IMG Academy.

Head Coach Josh Pastner is in his 7th season with the Jackets / Georgia Tech Athletics

Recruiting is just a singular part of the story, to fully understand the nose dive Tech basketball has taken since hoisting up an ACC Championship trophy, the history books have to come into play. Pastner’s current 2 years have been the worst consecutive years of ACC performance since 1980 and 1981 when the team went 1-13 and 0-14 in ACC play. Tech’s current 8-game-losing streak is the longest since the Jackets also lost eight in a row during the 2005-2006 season. If Tech drops another loss against NC State this Saturday, it will be the longest losing streak since that 1981 season when Tech went 0-14 in ACC play. If Tech ends the season at either 14th or 15th in the ACC, it will be the first time since 1980 that the Jackets have consecutively finished either last or second-to-last in the conference. Following that 1981 season, Georgia Tech fired then-Head Coach Dwane Morrison after just three years; Pastner should be facing that same fate if things do not change drastically.

To make matters interesting, Pastner signed a contract extension in 2020, after winning the ACC Championship, in which the terms place him at having a $2.5 million buyout if he were fired today according to Atlanta Journal-constitution’s Ken Sugiura.

Sorry for the delay. It's around $2.5M, I've been told.
— Ken Sugiura (@ksugiuraajc) January 25, 2023

Athletic Director J Batt and the Georgia Tech Athletic Department now sit in a very difficult situation as fans will begin to call for Josh Pastner’s termination if the season stays on this course. It is highly likely that there will be at least one more year of Pastner at the head coaching position for the sheer fact that Stansbury got trigger-happy with contract offers. However, not all is lost as this men’s basketball team is talented and they can win games, but they have to be motivated by their Coach and they have to find momentum soon. This team deserves better than losing to a horrendously bad Louisville team; they are too talented and skilled to lose a game like that because of bad coaching and a failure to be prepared by their staff. If the team cannot string something together at the end of this season, the sun should set on the Pastner era.

The men will be back in action on Saturday at 1:00 PM in Raleigh, North Carolina for a rematch against the North Carolina State Wolfpack.

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