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Evidently Jacksonville State head coach Jack Crowe likes Paul Johnson and likes Georgia Tech. Some of Crowe's comments yesterday include Georgia Tech winning the ACC title and comparing Jonathan Dwyer to Earl Campbell. Link here. Wow. Heady stuff. Either a true man-crush or a pre-game strategy to try and setup his opponent for an App.St type shock-the-world moment.
"But, here is my assessments and that’s all you can do is make assessments. I think that in their scheme and they had Adrian Peterson at Georgia Southern there was a phenomenal fullback in this offense. But I think in Jonathan Dwyer, they probably have a better player than they’ve ever had at that position. I have great respect for him. Some of our players tell me what a really special person and player he is. Some of our players know him. I don’t know if they ever could have recruited Jonathan to play fullback in this offense, but he’s probably perfect. You know, I see all kinds of problems because this is a fullback first offense and he is. I think you’d have to go back to (Earl) Campbell at Texas, to where you had such a great athlete running in such a similar situation because it was easy to see the way he finished the year last year. He was the next All-ACC right behind Tashad Choice. He was the next guy that was going to be the All-ACC runningback. So, that is a phenomenal issue for us, is him. And then you got a quarterback, quite honestly, that I think fits the thing to a tee. It’s a fullback/quarterback offense and you’ve got Josh Nisbett, a guy that was recruited to play a lot of positions by a lot of people. And probably his best skill is what they ask him to do and that’s when he plays with his legs and they’ve really ended up with a great fullback/quarterback. I don’t know if somebody picked a coach with a system to fit the players, but they did. You have to give somebody credit for making this a pretty good pick because those both fit.
"In fact, I think they make them an enormous threat early on, to anybody they play. You add to that, that they probably have down the field receiving ability - to change over from a previous offense and it probably gives you a higher passing threat than by far just in the carry over from people that normally line up in this offense. And, it’s hard to play the pass and play the option. I think - you can go back to Homer Rice who’s from Georgia Tech and back to Joe Hamilton. There has been an option quarterback that you just better not avoid the middle or down the field because Ralph was there and he would play the option and kill you with the pass. So its part of a Georgia Tech tradition to have these kind of quarterbacks with a really great combination of option and pass together.
"I have a very much appreciation for Paul and what he’s done at other places and I see an emerging offense that is going be very hard to handle for anybody. And you put us out there and I think we’ve got, maybe three starters returning on defense, maybe four, depending on if you want to call one that rotated a starter. We’re very young and that’s an enormous challenge for us. The real challenge is getting your offense the ball, because they can take the ball and keep the ball all day. So our defense is going to have to really show up and make plays because everybody wants to talk about offense and offensively we’re transitioning also.