In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower won a second term as President of the United States.
Don Larsen threw his perfect game in the World Series.
America hadn’t landed on the moon. Vietnam had not yet begun. Don Draper’s life and times in Mad Men had not been explored — not until the beginning of the 1960s.
In 1956, Pius XII was the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. A singer was just beginning to kick-start his career, a man named Elvis Presley.
*
Why this focus on 1956? Go through the history of Georgia Tech football over the past 60 years, and you’ll quickly find out.
In 1966, Georgia Tech went 9-2, reaching the Orange Bowl and playing an SEC team (hmmm — sound familiar?). The next season, in 1967, the Ramblin’ Wreck went 4-6.
In 1970 under Bud Carson (who would later become an accomplished NFL defensive coordinator), the Yellow Jackets went 9-3. In 1971, they fell to 6-6.
In 1985 under Bill Curry, Georgia Tech fashioned a marvelous 9-2-1 season. In 1986, the team stumbled to a 5-5-1 mark.
In 1991, one year removed from the school’s most recent national championship, the Yellow Jackets went 8-5. In 1990, en route to the summit of college football, Georgia Tech didn’t lose a game under coach Bobby Ross (11-0-1).
In 1998, Tech went 10-2 under George O’Leary, who has reminded college football followers how good a coach he is with the work he’s done at UCF. In 1999, though, Georgia Tech went 8-4, losing to Virginia and Wake Forest after pushing the eventual national champion Florida State Seminoles to the edge in Tallahassee. Once again, Georgia Tech left money on the table the year after putting together an impressive season.
In 2006, Georgia Tech responded to its first-ever ACC division title by losing to Wake Forest in the ACC Championship Game. The Yellow Jackets then slogged their way to a 7-6 record in 2007.
In 2009, Georgia Tech won the ACC, giving everyone the impression that Paul Johnson was going to win big in Atlanta.
In 2010, the Yellow Jackets finished with a 6-7 record. From 2011 through 2013, the program lost at least five games per season. Sustaining quality — not merely displaying it one season, but backing it up in the next one — has been a 59-year problem for this program. It’s not as though success is consistently elusive; every now and then, Georgia Tech unfurls a terrific season and gives its fans a teasing, tantalizing taste of what could be. This was never more apparent than in 1990, a national championship season which might not have been produced against the run of play, but was certainly achieved against the run of history since 1956.
In 1987 and 1988, Georgia Tech didn’t even win four games per season. In 1989, the team went 7-4 — solid, but hardly an indication that a journey into college football immortality was just around the corner.
*
In many ways, it’s hard to know what’s more improbable, with the benefit of history: Georgia Tech’s 1990 title, or the fact that the program didn’t transform itself as a result of that title.
Nevertheless, this is the world of Georgia Tech football: capable of doing not just great things, but the greatest of things, in single seasons, only to lose that same winning edge the very next year.
Moreover, to emphasize the point, it’s not as though the Jackets have endured this longstanding pattern with second-rate coaches. Bud Carson was one of the best defensive minds in the final quarter of the 20th century. Bill Curry won an SEC title at Alabama and guided Kentucky to a bowl game. George O’Leary has turned UCF into an immensely successful program. Before coming to Atlanta, Paul Johnson revived Navy football and handed it on to a well-trained, fully-prepared successor named Ken Niumatalolo.
Quality coaches have come and gone through Atlanta over the last 59 years, since Bobby Dodd put his iconic stamp on the program. Dodd is the last man to stack together two consecutive great seasons for the Yellow Jackets. In 1955, his team went 9-1-1. In 1956, Georgia Tech went 10-1, playing with a bulls-eye on its back and not suffering as a result.
These many years later, Georgia Tech is still waiting to witness back-to-back football seasons of the highest quality. A program capable of marvelous single-season surprises — such as 1990 and 2014 — simply hasn’t been able to thrive when scrutiny and expectations run high the following year.
If the Yellow Jackets can be as great in 2015 as they were in 2014, you’ll truly know that things have changed at Georgia Tech. “YOU CAN DO THAT!” will not be a laugh line anymore.