Georgia Tech will be heavily favored against Alcorn State next Thursday night in the college football opener for the Yellow Jackets inside Bobby Dodd Stadium, and their second game against visiting Tulane also looks promising.
From there, things get quite dicey for the reigning Orange Bowl champions and the 2014 Atlantic Coast Conference runners-up.
The 16th-ranked Yellow Jackets will play nine bowl opponents from a year ago in their final 10 games, highlighted by home games against Florida State and Georgia and road trips to Notre Dame and Clemson. Florida State, Georgia, Notre Dame and Clemson are ranked among the top 12 teams in the preseason Associated Press poll.
“I don’t think there is any question that this is the toughest schedule that we’ve had here,” coach Paul Johnson said Monday. “We finished last season with Clemson, Georgia, Florida State and Mississippi State, so we’ve had some tough roads in the past, but clearly going off the preseason picks, this will be the toughest schedule we’ve had here in a long time.”
Johnson, who is 58-35 through seven seasons with the Jackets, was a guest Monday on “Press Row” on Chattanooga’s ESPN 105.1 FM.
Georgia Tech will be led again by Justin Thomas, who has been the most effective triple-option quarterback of the Johnson era. A 5-foot-11, 189-pound redshirt junior from Prattville, Ala., Thomas rushed for 1,086 yards and 5.7 yards per carry last season and threw for 1,719 yards, tallying 18 touchdowns and only six interceptions.
“Any time you have a quarterback returning, it certainly helps,” Johnson said, “and he’s definitely a really good player. We’re glad that he’s on our team, and the big thing for him is just to continue working to get better and become more consistent.”
Heading Johnson’s concerns nine days from the opener are the lack of players who surrounded Thomas a year ago.
Thomas led the Jackets in rushing last season, but Synjyn Days (924 yards), Zach Laskey (851) and Charles Perkins (443) were next in line and were all seniors. Laskey had his best performance in the 30-24 overtime upset of Georgia in Athens, shredding the Bulldogs for 140 yards and three touchdowns.
Current senior running back Broderick Snoddy is a likely candidate to step up, having rushed 28 times for 283 yards (10.1 per carry) last year.
The Yellow Jackets also are having to replace their top four receivers, with redshirt junior Micheal Summers returning the most productivity. Summers had just seven catches for 45 yards last season.
“We think we’ve got some guys who can fill those roles, but until you play you never really know,” Johnson said. “We’ve also got to be much better defensively than we were a year ago. We’ve got a good nucleus returning over there, so we’re optimistic that we’re going to be much better on that side of the ball.”
The Yellow Jackets won 11 games last season for the second time under Johnson and for the fifth time in program history. They were projected before last season to finish fifth in the seven-team Coastal Division but won it and then nearly knocked off Florida State in the ACC title game.
There are heightened hopes this season despite the taxing schedule and personnel losses, but Johnson doesn’t see this year being different from any other.
“We have the same expectations every year inside the program, and there is never a great deal of change that way,” he said. “I’ve always looked at preseason polls as pretty much worthless. I don’t think anybody has any idea what people are going to be until you play a few games.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.