The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets dismantled the Boston College Eagles on Saturday, 37-17, as was to be expected.
The Yellow Jackets snapped a three-game skid and the team looked complete in the first half as they raced out to a 28-3 lead over the Eagles. The second half was a little bit of a different story, as they were outscored 14-9.
As From the Rumble Seat wrote, a 20-point win against the lowly Eagles looks good on paper. But for improvement's sake, the Yellow Jackets had a lot of mental breaks happen in the second half that shouldn't have occurred. Against lesser quality opponents like the Eagles, it's just easier to make up for them.
Not to say there wasn't a lot of good (1st half), but play like that against most any other team and we won't be so much winning as we will be jumping off of tall objects.
From the Rumble Seat wrote that the secondary was particularly prone to coverage issues, something that occurs way too often when the Yellow Jackets are up by a sizable margin. Both of the Eagles' two touchdowns were results of coverage breakdowns in the Yellow Jackets' defense.
Consider this: in the 1st half, BC had 7 first downs and 120 passing yards. By the end of the game, those numbers had gone up to 15 and 264. That may be linear growth, but a lot more of those yards came on big passing plays, largely up the middle, than before (53 yds in the 1st as opposed to 104 in the 2nd).
Obviously with the score as it was, it wasn't all bad for the Yellow Jackets. The defense was rock solid in the first half and the offense didn't really let up throughout the game. Georgia Tech came close to 400 yards on rushing (391 yards) and only allowed 32 yards on the ground to the Eagles.