Everything From Georgia Tech Head Coach Brent Key After Win Over Florida State

What did Key have to say after today's win over Florida State?

Aug 24, 2024; Dublin, IRL; Georgia Tech head coach Brent Key and Florida State University head coach Mike Norvell before the game at Aviva Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Tom Maher/INPHO via USA TODAY Sports / Tom Maher/INPHO via USA TODAY Sports

What a way to start the college football season.

Georgia Tech upset No. 10 Florida State in Dublin, Ireland and got the first big win of the year in college football. The Yellow Jackets got a massive win to start the year and afterward, head coach Brent Key spoke with the media. Here is everything that he had to say following the win.

Opening Statement...

"Really excited for the players and what they were able to accomplish tonight. We set our goals going into the season, and they really have nothing to do with the outcome of the football game. We all know that's what we want to occur, but our goal is to go out and play every play as hard as we can possibly play, not look at the scoreboard. And I know a lot of times people hear that. There's a really good game in the league to be able to have the defending conference champs on the stage tonight in the ACC, and to be able to showcase what the league is in a competitive good football. And I know we have a really good marketing slogan in our league. It talks about the league of the quarterback and whatnot. I think you can add the line of scrimmage to that too. And that's where big games were won at the line of scrimmage. And I'm really proud of the offensive line. Shocking there, right? Really proud of those guys and how they were prepared. The defense, you know, once they settled in, you know, Tyler Santucci, and I hadn't said a word about it. I've just kind of, I've told our team. And really, that's what matters is our team. We're not trying to prove anything to anyone. We're not trying to go out and impress people. All we're doing is trying to play as hard as we can possibly play together as a team, as a family we have in that locker room. And I was confident this week.

I was confident because of the plan that was put together in the progress I've seen made really from the start of the year until now. And really proud of the way those guys. anything intentional the way it came across. We just got to, you know, we got to coach him to keep those hands lower so that doesn't happen. Then LaMiles had the PI, the DPI on the deep ball. And we have one fault start on the offensive line. But all in all, it was a clean game for the first game of the season. And that's what you want to see. You want to be able to limit your mistakes and self defeating errors. And we want to play for 60 minutes. We want to build a tough discipline football team that's committed to themselves individually and in the team. And we talk about execution with our football team. And what execution is that that's the confidence to go make a play. Whether you're a quarterback, whether you're a offensive lineman and balls on the one yard line and they're going to run behind you, whether you're a corner making a play on a ball in a man -to -man situation where you're a kicker at the end of the game to win the football game. And we had our final walkthrough yesterday. And the last play we had in the walkthrough was a field goal. And I stopped it and brought them together and said, guys, this game's going to come down to a field goal. This is your last rep of perfection before we go into the game. Total confidence in Aiden Birr. What a football player he is.

What a football player. And when I say that, I don't say that lightly now. He's a football player. He's on leadership. He does that all the time. And you know, missed one earlier, a long one. And you talk about ice in his veins now. I mean, he came up to me because, yeah, Coach, I'm good. I don't care where the ball is. Just put it down. I'm going to make it. And the confidence for him. So again, credit to Mike Norvell for having his team come over here and have them prepared to come here and play a football game. But really happy for our people, really happy for the ACC and what this league is and for other people to see that as well. But we'll enjoy this tonight. We've got our early meeting tomorrow morning before we head back home. We'll get back home around 2:30. We'll go straight to the weight room, lift, stretch and stride, have meetings, head outside, practice. They'll be back in class on Monday, and then we'll get ready to go. We've got a game next Saturday back at home. So again, appreciate everyone's hospitality here. What an unbelievable experience this has been for us as a football team as an entire institution. It's been a great experience to come over here and share our game with everyone here. So again, I just want to thank you everyone for the hospitality. I'm just really excited about the rest of the season. I think it's underway when we wake up tomorrow morning."

1. On the defense...

"Yeah, you know, And Tyler talked to the defense last night, and he said 166 days ago, they started a journey. And he told them their only goal was to be the best version of the 2024 Georgia Tech defense that they could be. Not to be anything more than that. Last night was the first meeting I sat in with the full defense, and that was an intentional thing. I wanted those guys to understand the confidence I had in Tyler Santucci and his staff. And last night I said in that meeting, I stood up at it when it was over. And I told those guys, I cannot wait to see y 'all go out on that field and play together as one. And we talk about there's going to be setbacks. There's going to be obstacles to overcome. It's not about that. It's about playing the next play. It's about playing the next play. Success and failure, I really wanted the same. They can both be distractions to you. And you've got to stay in the moment, play the next play. And I thought that's what they did tonight."

2. On the confidence he has in his team...

"You know, you build confidence going against each other. And the confidence really came from seeing the defense rest over the, you know, throughout spring practice, throughout the summer, throughout training camp. I mean, I thought our offensive line played a good game tonight, where they got punched in the face for a week and a half of training camp. I mean, we couldn't get a yard on the ground. And so that that built confidence that, you know, the, in this football team, you know, we added a lot of depth. We were able to play a lot of guys on the defense tonight. Play, a lot of guys play their first football game, first meaningful snaps in a football game on that side of the ball, right? And that's only going to help us with their mistakes, yeah, there's mistakes, right? But those guys now have playing time, you know, as a coach, a lot of times when it gets into a really tight football game, you get nervous about those rotations and having a guy in there that hadn't, you know, it necessarily, quote, unquote, the starter. But he stuck to the plan. Tyler stuck to the plan, kept those guys coming in, and those guys would be better football players for it this season."

3. On declining the penalty early in the game and stopping FSU on 4th down...

"Yeah, and it was really kind of that no -man's land on the field, too. You know, you have to know your team, but you also have to know your opponent. You have to know what your opponent's tendencies are. You have to know, you know, how they play the game. I won't get into everything about it, but, you know, there's a, it's part of the football game. And look, that's a roll of the dice deal right there now. Sure. I mean, that's one if you look up, you know, ask 100 experts on it. You probably you probably get 50 -50. You back them up or you take away the down. And I thought right there at that time that eliminating the down was the best decision."

4. On the mentality of his team...

"I think it does. I would like to think it does. I'm sitting here in Dublin, Ireland, right now, and I couldn't tell you the difference if I'm sitting in Tallahassee, Florida, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Chapel Hill, I mean, it's, when you are really coaching a team and training a team to live in the moment and be where their feet are, it doesn't matter where you play. It doesn't matter how you get there. Once you're there, you're there. Thursday was a Thursday. No different than a Thursday at home. Friday was a Friday. to this entire country, wow, what a difference that time span has made in the love of the game, the understanding of the game, people embracing the game. Huge, huge. And credit to the people that have been putting this game on and how they have increased the popularity of it throughout the entire country. But when we came over 10 years ago, we did a lot of the things."

5. On the running back position, namely Chad Alexander...

"He's really a great example of who we are as a football team. We've got a lot of guys that aren't being enough. You know, man, maybe fast enough. You know, might have been overlooked at another school and decided to come here. You know, they just, that's who we are, right? And it's, that's who these guys are building themselves into. And, you know, Chad, Chad's up 185 pounds. Right now he does run a 10.3. He can roll now. But he didn't be wanting that that was impressive. He was running between the tackles and pushing the pile. And, you know, just the resiliency that he showed and the toughness that he showed. That was his first carry in a football game tonight. First carry. And he's getting positive yards. He's falling forward. Well, those are the same things we saw in the scrimmages. You know, I the team is sit in our first game of the season. Y 'all have played against each other twice already. We know who we are. Now it's time to go out and have the confidence to go out and play. But that's what he was doing all preseason camp. So really happy for Chad."

6. On the lessons learned from this game...

"You know, once I sit down, I'll have more time to think about that. There's always lessons learned. There's lessons learned in good and there's lessons learned in bad. Just because... Coach Saban just talk a lot about, you know, never wasting a failure, right? Well, you also can't waste these because that ball goes one way or the other in the last play, and we don't win the football game. That doesn't change the first 60 minutes of the game, right? Well, if you lose the game, now you're going to be different and going back when you're addressing the mistakes and the things you have to get better at. You have to be the same. And when we see those mistakes, when we see those things, those are things we have to address and we have to correct, we have to fix. But I don't think I learned anything from a mindset standpoint. I think it just confirmed it."

7. On the fumbles late in the game...

"No, so we are, we're a motion, I mean, obviously, right? We're a motion shift football team, and we have a lot of different receivers running those motions, right? And, you know, for a defense, it's really hard when that ball is being snapped, right, because you don't know the window dressing, the eye candy that takes place. So we weren't really hard to get that timed up exactly. right? And, you know, for a defense, it's really hard when that ball is being snapped, right, because you don't know the window dressing, the eye candy that takes place. So we weren't really hard to get that timed up exactly. And the timing of it was a little bit off, and ended up on the ground. So Haynes was able to get it back. We had a couple of snap issues like that. We had the one that earlier in the football game that was a low left snap. Usually that comes from not following through. That's something we can work and correct and fix. But look, Look, there's hundreds of things we have to correct and fix in that football game."

8. On the final field goal from Aidan Birr...

"Yeah, so the way the wind was blowing the stadium, it didn't feel a lot, but it was a huge difference going south than it was going north. The open end of the stadium, it was coming in that way, which is kind of what we expected. You know, the kick line from the going into the open end was around a 30, you know, 35 -ish. We had right at 35 and we probably could push it to a 38 with Aidan's leg if it was a game on the line type situation. Now going the other way, it was a 40, you know, 40 to 42 mark that we were looking at. And obviously, they were looking at the exact same mark. I mean, that kicker has the same leg that Aidan does. We came up short on ours. We missed ours, and they hit theirs right before halftime, going into the south end of the stadium. But, I don't know if you mean, you could, you see me. There was a lot of conversation between me and Aidan leading up to that, really the whole game, because it didn't take long in a football game to realize it's going to be a close game, right? When you start looking at possessions. You have three possessions in the first half of the game. Now a sudden there's 11 minutes on the clock on the fourth and you know, okay, well, we're going to get the ball back one more time after this. I think it was six and a half minutes left, six, whatever it was, six something left from the clock and we got the ball back. So you're playing, all right, yeah, let's score the surest way. I mean, if you're not going to take a knee on the one yard line and kick a field goal, we were going to score because it was a tie ball game. It would get a little different if you're up and you're winning, but we also wanted to take time off the clock, right? We knew they had all three timeouts plus the new, the two -minute timeout that's factored into it. So we were able to hold our timeouts and I have to waste them and get the ball to where it needed to be. But yeah, man, when that ball went fluttering back behind, I went, oh no, oh no, oh no, but you got to have confidence in your players. Or you have to. You can't just say you have confidence in them all week."

9. On the mentality of the team and if that shows growth and development...

"Yeah, again, you know what you know about the football team when it goes against each other. And once you play a different opponent, you'll find out. So the amount of times that he took off and ran and scrambled, right, but he didn't try to force the ball, right? You know, I thought Buster did a really good job, too, of calling some of those plays on third down to get guys open and they're playing man coverage and, you know, going into the game, we got a new left tackle out there, and they got a pretty good pass rusher. And so, you know, you look at the timing of all those things. Haynes did a really good job of protecting the football, all right, reserving the right to kick, and putting us in a position to win the game."

10. On the focus for the next game...

"Yeah, you know, as a coach, you always have concern. I mean, you may have to me. I I may have 10 ,000 things in my head spinning right now that we have to make sure we get to in the mindset and how we're going to talk to them and what we're going to do. We'll have a team meeting at 7 .30 tomorrow morning and talk about the game. As soon as this is over, I mean, I'm heading back and I'm starting watching the film and grading it. We'll close out the game as quick as we can and then be able to move on. There's a lot of things in your head that go on. We talked about at first we learned how not to lose. Then we talked about we learned how to win. The next step in this journey is learning how to win consistently. Okay? The team that I believe we have, right, we'll go back to work. We'll go back to work. And the good thing is, we've got a six or seven -hour plane ride to be able to make sure we get that message across."