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Football fever in Georgia
Yellow Jackets ready to shake end of '06

• Despite a rough finish to last season, Ga. Tech is confident about its upcoming campaign.

Colin Chmielewski

MACON — Andrew Gardner can’t pick the game that stung him most at the end of the 2006 season.

Gardner and his Georgia Tech teammates lost their final three games by three points each. There was the 15-12 heartbreaker against Georgia, the 9-6 slopfest against Wake Forest in the ACC title game and — finally — the 38-35 shootout loss to West Virginia in the Gator Bowl.

Pick one. They all had the same effect on the Yellow Jackets.

“I feel like we’ve heard it every day,” said Gardner, a junior offensive tackle. “When people were getting tired lifting or running, somebody was always there to remind us of how last year ended. And how we lost all those games in the fourth quarter. I think it’s a huge motivator to what we want to do this season because we know how close we were to tasting championship.”

And what Georgia Tech wants to do this season is show that it is more about the 9-2 start last season than the 0-3 finish.

Gardner and two of his teammates, punter Durant Brooks and defensive tackle Darryl Richard, were gathered at the Peach State Pigskin Preview in Macon on Wednesday to discuss the upcoming 2007 season.

“The rest of this conference needs to look,” Richard said. “Something’s going on in Atlanta right now. We feel really good about how (we) can come and play ball.”

Much of the excitement coming from Georgia Tech surrounds the defense — which has built a reputation as perennially stingy — and new quarterback Taylor Bennett. Bennett, a junior, is somewhat of an unknown commodity, but the Yellow Jackets’ defense returns almost everyone.

“I feel really confident,” said Richard, a redshirt junior. “I mean, we trying to be a Top 15, Top 10 unit. We have the personnel to get it done. We have guys with the tenacity and the ambitious sprit to make it happen.”

As it was last year, Georgia Tech’s offense will have the spotlight on it — the Yellow Jackets scored 12 or fewer points in five games last season. But after Bennett stepped in for the academically ineligible Reggie Ball in the Gator Bowl, Tech had reason to be excited. Bennett threw for 326 yards and three TDs, but apparently already had won over the respect of his teammates.

“The thing about it is not so much watching Taylor Bennett during the game, it’s watching Taylor Bennett during the week,” Richard said. “Sometimes Taylor Bennett would be in the film room by himself when he wasn’t even going to be the starter. When you got things like that going on, you don’t worry about this guy who’s coming into play. You know he has the intangibles.”

Supporting Bennett will be four returning starters on the offensive line, star running back Tashard Choice and a group of receivers led by James Johnson. Gardner feels confident enough in the unit that the departure of star wideout Calvin Johnson isn’t even that troubling.

“The pieces are there definitely,” Gardner said. “I think there’s the potential there for a lot of points to be scored. If we do score those points, if the defense just stays where they are, that right there is four more wins from last year. I think that we’re going to make it happen this year.”

That challenge begins for the Yellow Jackets with a nationally televised visit to Notre Dame on Sept. 1 — a game Georgia Tech has had circled since last season’s 14-10 loss.

“I think everyone on our team feels like we should have won last year,” Gardner said. “I feel like we can go in this year and get this season started off on the right foot, where we weren’t able to last year.”

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