I could get snarky and start this post off by just saying, "Hey, he's 3-7 against Georgia in the last 10 years."
That would be ignoring the fact, though, that he's 2-2 against Georgia in the last four years and hasn't lost in Sanford Stadium since 2012.
So don't worry, Tech fans, I'm not going to be entirely snarky here. There will be a fair amount of snark, of course, since that's my second language, but I'm going to give CPJ a fair shake...despite the fact that he's a miserable human being and looks like Trantor the Troll from Ernest Scared Stupid.
The primary reason for Tech to keep Paul Johnson around right now is simply because he's the best option for the Yellow Jackets.
In the last 30 years, Tech has had wildly wavering successes and failures. They "won" a national championship in 1990, and then have been back-and-forth ever since. There's no doubt that Tech's best seasons since 1991 have all come under Johnson's tenure, with an (ultimately vacated) ACC title in 2009 and another two appearances in the title game in 2012 and 2014.
Now most fans want Johnson gone because of this inconsistency in his record. He'll have a 10-3 season, then not do better than eight wins the next four years. He'll go 11-3 with a win over the Bulldogs in Athens, but then he'll have two losing seasons over the next three years.
That level of inconsistency is awfully annoying for a fanbase, no doubt, but it isn't like Tech is coming from a recent history of high-caliber teams. Tech's last 30 years have been marred by inconsistency.
The other great knock on Johnson is that he's a terrible recruiter, which is both true and false.
Johnson isn't so much a terrible recruiter as he is someone who just doesn't care about recruiting to begin with.
The 2018 class is ranked just 54th in the country and 10th in the ACC. A surging ACC, at that, where Louisville, Clemson, Miami, and, at times, FSU are all soaking up national spotlight.
Then again, I'm not so sure Paul Johnson deserves the blame he takes for poor recruiting. According to 247Sports.com, Tech's recruiting classes since 2000 have ranked an average of about 48th in the nation (48.26). Since Johnson came on the scene, Tech's classes have dropped significantly...to 51st (51.00).
So if Johnson "doesn't care" about recruiting or "is a poor recruiter," then it doesn't really show. His recruiting classes have been pretty much on par with Tech's standard talent pool over the last decade before him.
The advantage Johnson has as a recruiter is that he does a better job of picking out the guys he wants rather than just going for top-star players. There's a surgical precision to his recruiting because he knows the type of players he needs.
Sure, Tech could fire Johnson and go out and land some dynamic coach and try to replicate what Clemson has done in the ACC. It's totally within the realm of possibility, but it isn't likely.
With Johnson, what you get is a coach who can take Tech's standard level of talent and get more out of it.
Johnson may not be the most dynamic recruiter. Perhaps a smarter recruiter could leverage the benefits of playing in Atlanta more to his advantage, but Tech has several disadvantages on the recruiting trail right now.
For starters, you're going up against SEC teams that are all recruiting at a higher level than you are. Georgia alone has finished several spots ahead of Tech in recruiting classes every year since 2001. In 2000, Tech was ranked 19th nationally while Georgia was 23rd. The only year it even comes close after that is 2007 when Tech was 15th and Georgia was eighth.
Since Georgia and Tech are both obviously recruiting the state of Georgia pretty heavily, right there you see that Tech is not getting the best talent available out of their home state.
Then in the conference, Tech has finished no better than seventh in the ACC for recruiting classes since 2009. Prior to Johnson, Tech was third in 2007, eighth in 2003, and fourth in 2000.
Tech's classes average out at about ninth in the conference (9.32) since 2000 and the same rank under Johnson (9.55). In that same span, Clemson, Miami, and FSU have all dominated the ACC recruiting wars.
Clemson averages about fourth in the ACC since 2000 (3.95) and even better since 2008 when Johnson entered the league (2.82). Miami has only been worse than third in the ACC once in the last 18 recruiting cycles, when they were sixth in 2011, for an average of about second place (2.26) and only slightly lower (2.55) since 2008. FSU has had multiple national-best recruiting classes since 2000 (2001, 2003) and has been in the top 10 nationally 13 of the last 18 cycles. They average out at first in the ACC over the last 18 seasons (1.53) and have even been slightly better since 2008 (1.36).
So even outside the state of Georgia, the rest of the ACC talent pool generally goes elsewhere.
If you honestly expect Tech to bring in a new coach to drastically improve their recruiting position while angling against several top ACC and SEC teams for the same recruiting ground, you are deluding yourself.
Remember when I said there would be snark? Exhibit A.
The benefit to Tech is that the state of Georgia is undeniably fertile in recruiting. Most estimates put Georgia as the fourth-best state for high school football in the country, but we often have just as many Division-I prospects per capita as the top states of Texas, Florida, and California. The problem for Tech is that everyone else knows this.
So there are plenty of players to go around, but the top dogs (and Dawgs) take the lion's share of those prospects. That's been the case for the last 20 years and neither Chan Gailey nor Paul Johnson were able to stem that tide.
With Johnson, you have a coach who actually knows how to get the most out of these second-tier players.
Consider this. I know I gave you information for a lot of top ACC teams earlier, but there's another team that has had much better success recruiting than Tech over the last two decades: Virginia.
Seriously. The Hoos have averaged 39th nationally (39.00) and between seventh and eighth (7.68) in the ACC since 2000. Since Johnson entered the league in 2008, the Hoos have dropped a little bit in both categories (45.82 nationally, 8.91 conference). Both numbers are reasonably better than Johnson's numbers with Tech, mind you, as I laid out before (51.00 nationally, 9.55 conference).
However, Tech has done significantly better than Virginia where it counts: wins.
The Jackets are averaging 7.50 wins per season under Johnson, virtually identical to the 7.56 wins per seasons they've had every year since 2000, while Virginia is averaging 6.00 wins per year since 2000 and 5.10 wins per year since 2008.
Now obviously you could use this as evidence that the recruiting experts at 247Sports.com don't know what they're talking about, and there is quite a bit of truth to the fact that recruit ranking is an inexact science, but the data still shows an obvious trend.
With similar, and moderately inferior, product to work from, Tech has done much more than others.
I can fully understand why Tech fans are growing more and more frustrated with Johnson. After all, he has produced two losing seasons in the last three years and his teams are woeful on defense, even if they do have some of the most prolific offenses in the country over the last decade.
He is a stubborn, old-school coach who refuses to adapt his system or his methods. He is a cantankerous old coot who never looks happy, and he doesn't have the winning prowess of Nick Saban to get away with that.
Plus, have I mentioned how he looks like Trantor the Troll?
There are certainly reasons to get annoyed with Johnson. For all of the talk about how he's a great coach and master strategist, the fact remains that he has made several decisions that cost his teams in big moments.
He controversially decided to go for two against Tennessee in the opener this past season in the first overtime. I will forever say that was a bone-headed decision when Tech would have almost certainly had better luck expanding to the third or fourth overtime rather than trying to end it right there.
Let's say the national average for converting on a 2-point play is 50%. It varies year-to-year, but is often much lower than that. Tech's offense converts somewhere closer to 66% of their 2-point attempts because their offense is just built for that short-yardage play.
They lost in 2OT, one overtime before the 2-point play would have been mandatory.
In other words, Tech's chances at besting Tennessee when trading 2-point plays were much better than trying for it early.
Then in the 2010 UGA vs. GT game in Athens, with the Dawgs up one late in the fourth, Johnson tells his players to let us through for an easy TD, making it an eight point game with slightly more than a minute left.
Sure, if we pick up a first down on that drive rather than scoring, the game is over. And had we realized this and taken a knee, his "get out of the way" defense would have certainly cost his team the game.
Mark Richt was very kind when he said that he had been out-coached in that moment, but I disagree. In a game that had already been characterized by frequent turnovers, for a total of six between both teams, it was a horrible decision. Why not coach your players to try for a stop or to get the ball back?
Johnson is the kind of coach who is so self-assured of his abilities as a strategist that he talks himself into poor game-time decisions. And since he famously doesn't believe in having signals for his offenses, there's really no way for him to back out of these decisions after he's made them. Aside from burning a timeout, of course, that he may not always have left.
So I certainly see both sides. I think Tech fans can be right to argue either direction. But consider this.
Johnson has brought more success to Tech in the last decade than anyone has had in a long time, outside of that bizarre championship team in 1990. It has been inconsistent success, to be sure, but it has been success. He's coached in three ACC championship games (one by default since Miami won the division but was self-banned) in ten years, winning one, and delivered his team to two "BCS" bowls. That is an impressive level of success for most teams.
This man is 8-2 against Paul Johnson. And lost his job. Now he gets to beat Tech in-conference every year.
Tech has to decide what kind of team they want to be. In all reality, they have to make a similar decision to the one Georgia fans made when deciding on Mark Richt. Do you want to maintain the course and enjoy a better level of success than you had before, or do you want to pull the handle and take a gamble on some unknown factors?
It was a perfect storm for Georgia with Kirby Smart. It was as close to a sure thing as you can get with an unknown factor like a first-time head coach. Not to mention that Georgia had to decide about a coach routinely winning 10 games or more each year, not one who had just come off his second losing season in the last three years, so the product was already here for Smart.
There's no such name floating out there right now, unless you think Tech could have somehow enticed Scott Frost away before Nebraska came calling. Or some similar coach. And I'm not convinced that Tech has the kind of pull to do that.
College football is an arms race. Tech has somehow succeeded (on occasion) without really playing the game. They don't have the fanciest facilities or the most supportive fan base. They don't have the clout or prestige of some programs. They have a bevy of academic issues to work around that most state universities don't have to fight with.
But Tech has still won a few games, I would argue more than their share, with much less. Most of that is directly because of Paul Johnson.
So Tech can try to do better, or they can understand that they might just be in the best position they can manage right now strictly because of this hated coach.
If Tech tries to shift to a pro-style offense now, with Georgia and Bama and Clemson and Miami taking the top-tier recruits, they will never win. If they keep trying to play Johnson's game and using the scraps to make a buffet, they'll occasionally find a filet hidden in the flap steaks. And that might just be the best case for the trade school on North Avenue.
NOTE: All photos provided by Larry Wynn. Visit LarryWynn.com to see even more of his sports photography.