Georgia Tech boosts confidence with victory over Western Carolina

While Georgia Tech’s 35-17 victory against Western Carolina was far from impressive, it can’t be overstated how important it was for a football team that had lost seven straight games and had been outscored 141-10 in its past three games dating to last season.

“It’s definitely a confidence builder,” Georgia Tech running back Dontae Smith said. “We kind of struggled in the last three games that we played, and so this is definitely putting our confidence back where it needed to be. We’re going to keep it rolling.”

Whether the Yellow Jackets can do just that remains to be seen.

The Yellow Jackets (1-1) have plenty of issues to address before Saturday’s home game against the No. 20 Ole Miss Rebels (2-0), who have outscored their two opponents 87-13 after hammering Central Arkansas 59-3 on Saturday.

The Yellow Jackets weren’t nearly as dominant against Western Carolina (1-1).

The Yellow Jackets gave up a whopping 390 yards of total offense to Western Carolina, which held Georgia Tech quarterback Jeff Sims to 7-for-14 passing for 100 yards, including zero yards in the second half.

Western Carolina, which Georgia Tech was favored to beat by 24.5 points, had the ball for more than 40 minutes on Saturday.

“[Western Carolina has] really good players, and we had our hands full,” Georgia Tech coach Geoff Collins said. “We contributed to that with some [bad reads] early to let some things happen that shouldn’t have happened, but we’ll get those things cleaned up and get them fixed and get ready for next Saturday.”

But it wasn’t all bad for the Yellow Jackets.

Georgia Tech caused four turnovers — interceptions by Derrik Allen, Myles Sims and Charlie Thomas and a fumble recovery by Aliyde Eley — and held the Catamounts to 118 yards in the second half after allowing 272 in the first 30 minutes.

Western Carolina scored touchdowns on its first two drives in the first nine minutes before the Yellow Jackets held the Catamounts to three points the rest of the way.

“We made critical mistakes against the No. 4 team in the country, but they were all fixable,” Collins said referring to a season-opening 41-10 loss to Clemson on Labor Day. “It doesn’t mean we can wave the magic wand and it is all magically fixed, but we work on them every single day to fix our issues.”

The Yellow Jackets also ran the ball well.

Smith rushed for a game-high 102 yards and three touchdowns and Sims added 48 yards on eight carries and Nate McCollum ran for 47 yards on just two carries. Georgia Tech finished 243 yards on 34 carries, a whopping 7.1 yards per attempt.

“That’s what we wanted to do and that was a big point of emphasis,” Collins said. “I thought our guys did it.”

Smith’s career-long 51-yard touchdown run broke a 14-14 tie with 4:35 left in the first quarter before McCollum’s 40-yard scoring run on the Yellow Jackets’ next possession gave them a 21-14 lead they wouldn’t relinquish with 10:56 left in the half.

“I think the biggest thing is we wanted to establish the run,” Collins said, “and I thought Jeff did a great job of getting us in the right looks to help us have success in the run game as well.”

The Yellow Jackets scored touchdowns on five of their first nine possessions.

“It felt good to finally get things going,” Smith said. “Not that we did a bad job last week, and the O-line did a good job last week, but it starts with the O-line. If they come out, and they do what they need to do, then that makes my job easy. That makes the rest of our jobs easy.”

Georgia Tech Athletics