Back on Rivalry Weekend, Georgia Tech scored a nice road win at Georgia on a pretty cool, pretty weird game-clinching touchdown. The play looked like a sweep pitch and throwback to the quarterback, but it turned into something else.
Paul Johnson fact-checks Kirby Smart and calls him ‘the guy from Georgia’
It’s related to Wakeyleaks. Just trust me.
Photo by Scott Cunningham/Getty Images
Tech’s Qua Searcy decided not to try for a touchdown pass to QB Justin Thomas, who slipped away to run a wheel route concept across the field. Searcy instead tucked the ball and ran, and he scored by diving through a mess of UGA defenders. Pretty cool play, and it got Tech to 8-4 on the year. Georgia is a mere 7-5.
After the game, Georgia coach Kirby Smart told reporters, “That’s one of their toughest plays. We repped that play all week.”
Fast-forward a couple of weeks, and the college football world is rapt with the espionage caper unfolding at Wake Forest.
The Demon Deacons say Tom Elrod, a former player and coach who’d been a Deacs radio commentator for three years, passed confidential game-plan information to opponents for years. Louisville has already come forward to say offensive coordinator Lonnie Galloway, a former colleague of Elrod’s, received such intel before a Wake-Louisville game this year. Head coach Bobby Petrino has said he knew nothing.
Georgia Tech coach Paul Johnson has now used #Wakeyleaks as an occasion to make fun of Smart, his rival coach at Georgia.
“In fact, our last game, didn’t the guy from Georgia say they knew that the throwback was coming?” Johnson said to media members on Tuesday, according to Dawg Nation. “That’s pretty good, since we hadn’t run it all year.”
Wait, let’s back up here. Did Johnson just call Smart the guy from Georgia?
<looks closely at sentence>
Why, yes. Yes, he did.
To be clear, Johnson is not offering an accurate paraphrasing. There’s no public commentary from Smart that suggests he “knew that the throwback was coming,” as Johnson suggests. Smart just called it “one of their toughest plays” — still odd, if Tech really hadn’t run it all year, but not as clandestine as Johnson implies.
Johnson, for what it’s worth, doesn’t think game-plan leaking is out of the ordinary. Via the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
“I think anybody who’s been in coaching for any amount of time has been skunked before somewhere,” Johnson said.
Johnson said that he believed it happened to Navy when he coached the Midshipmen at the 2003 Houston Bowl against Texas Tech.
“We had a couple plays that we hadn’t run all year and when we lined up, they went and started checking to ’em,” he said.
Lots is going on here, but Johnson calling Smart “the guy from Georgia” is easily the zestiest ingredient in the entire recipe.
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