Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets vs Maryland Terrapins Football Recap

This is the first time this season the Georgia Tech offense looked completely ordinary. Even so, the Yellow Jackets are still sixth in the nation in scoring and first in the nation in rushing, which shows just how dominant the offense has been over the course of the season.

Better yet, the Jackets are still unbeaten in 2011. They’re 6-0 for the first time since 1966.

What Georgia Tech will need to figure out is if the offense was just kind of “off” against Maryland, or whether there’s some deeper problem. For a precision offense like the triple option, if everything isn’t quite clicking, the offense can go from dangerous to feeble in a hurry.

Georgia Tech remains unbeaten and is bowl eligible at 6-0 after beating Maryland, though the meat of its schedule has yet to be played. After Virginia, the Yellow Jackets play Miami, Clemson and Virginia Tech in succession before closing the season against arch-rival Georgia. Tavin Washington had easily his worst game of the year passing the ball, going only 6-of-19 for 114 yards, nothing like the numbers he’s been putting up in other games this year. He also threw an interception inside the Maryland 20 yard line just before the end of the first half. Washington led the Yellow Jackets in rushing with 120 yards on 32 carries.

Georgia Tech started out with touchdown drives on two of their first possessions, but did not score for the remainder of the first half. A Maryland field goal early in the game accounted for its only points of the half, as the teams went into the locker room with a 14-3 Tech lead. The Yellow Jackets opened the second half with a Tony Zenon 79 yard return to the Maryland 17, and Washington quickly took advantage of the field position with a scoring dash to make the score 21-3 just a little over two minutes into the second half, but Georgia Tech would not score again.

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Maryland’s big fourth quarter started on their first touch of the quarter after a Georgia Tech drive stalled after Washington nearly picked up a 4th-and-11 conversion on the ground, getting stopped just short. On the next play, C.J. Brown, who head coach Randy Edsall put in at quarterback to give the Terrapins a spark after Danny O’Brien started the game flat, dashed 77 yards for a TD run. Brown led Maryland 53 yards down the field on its next possession to cut the Georgia Tech lead to 21-16 with seven and a half minutes to go in the game. After forcing a punt, Maryland got the ball back with over four minutes to go, but a Brown pass on fourth down fell incomplete near midfield, and Tech was able to run down the clock to secure a tenuous win.

Danny O’Brien started the game 1-of-6 passing for 17 yards and an interception before he was replaced in the second quarter. Brown wasn’t much better, passing for only 36 yards and hitting just 4 of 17 attempts with an INT of his own, but Brown can run, unlike O’Brien, and he led the Terps with 124 rushing yards on 9 carries, including that 77 yard scoring play which electrified his team’s sideline. Davin Meggett had 86 yards on 18 carries.

The Terps, which fell to 2-3 on the season, finished with 333 yards, of which 246 were on the ground. Surprisingly, GT didn’t have that many more yards, finishing with only 386, by far the lowest output of the season. The Yellow Jackets also had only 272 rushing yards, also a season low.